Donald Trump went off the rails again early in the morning of Monday, May 19, calling for a “major investigation” of Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé and other celebrities who endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, accusing them of taking illegal payments from Harris’ campaign for their endorsement.

“Monday’s post was different in that it actually calls for retribution in the form of an investigation against Springsteen and Beyoncé, as well as Oprah Winfrey and U2 singer Bono,” the Arizona Republic’s Bill Goodykoontz reported. “I am going to call for a major investigation into this matter. Candidates aren’t allowed to pay for ENDORSEMENTS, which is what Kamala did, under the guise of paying for entertainment. In addition, this was a very expensive and desperate effort to artificially build up her sparse crowds. IT’S NOT LEGAL!”

How will Attorney General Pam Bondi respond?

It wasn’t long after Bruce Springsteen lashed out at what the singer/songwriter called the “treasonous” Trump in Manchester, England, on the first stop of his “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour, Trump responded on his social media platform, calling Springsteen “just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country“.

Trump added: “Springsteen is ‘dumb as a rock,’ and couldn’t see what was going on, or could he (which is even worse!)? This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

Trump and Springsteen represent two very different faces of American culture, one forged in the boardrooms, gold-plated towers of Manhattan, and realty television, while Springsteen made his bones in dive bars of New Jersey. Trump, with his bombast and branding, rose to political power by channeling discontent, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and racism into a populist wave. With Springsteen, “The Boss,” who also spent decades giving voice to that same discontent through gritty lyrics and blue-collar anthems, there is always a sense of positivity; that America can live up to its lofty ideals.

The contrast is more than stylistic, it’s visceral and philosophical. Trump, a wannabe emperor, has often spoken of winning, power, loyalty from his acolytes, and spectacle. Springsteen sings about struggle, working-class dignity, and the quiet resilience of ordinary people. During Trump’s presidency, Springsteen became an outspoken critic, saying the country had lost its soul. Trump, meanwhile, has dismissed artists like Springsteen as out of touch elites.

While Trump was mainly focusing on Springsteen’s remarks, for some inexplicable reason, he renewed his attack on Taylor Swift. Minutes before his Springsteen rant, he wrote: “Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’” MSNBC noted that “Swift, the top-selling global artist of 2024, has stepped away from the spotlight in recent months after wrapping her record-breaking international ‘Eras Tour’ in December. Trump lashed out at her during the 2024 election cycle after she endorsed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

“The American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada will not remain silent as two of our members − Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift − are singled out and personally attacked by the President of the United States,” the group said. “Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift are not just brilliant musicians, they are role models and inspirations to millions of people in the United States and across the world. … Musicians have the right to freedom of expression, and we stand in solidarity with all our members.”

At a performance after Trump’s rant, The Boss repeated his remarks about Trump at the E Street Band’s May 17 show at the Co-op Live in Manchester, England. Springsteen also repeated his statement on free speech before “My City of Ruins”: “There’s some very weird, strange, and dangerous (expletive) going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.”

The Arizona Republic’s Goodykoontz pointed out that “according to Verify, as long as candidates disclose payment [it is legal]. The Harris campaign paid Winfrey’s production company $1 million for helping produce a campaign rally in 2024. The Harris campaign also paid Beyoncé’s production company $165,000 after the singer appeared at a campaign event (Beyoncé didn’t perform).

“The campaign has denied that it made personal payments to any artist or performer, with a spokesperson telling Deadline, ‘We do not pay. We have never paid any artist and performer.’ Payments to production companies and crews are routine.”

In 2003, at a concert in London, The Dixie Chicks (now known as The Chicks) spoke out against George W. Bush and the Iraq War, triggering a backlash that had an enormous effect on the group’s career. The Dixie Chicks were at the time one of the country’s most popular acts. The statement triggered a backlash from American country listeners, and the group was blacklisted by many country radio stations, received death threats and was criticized by other country musicians.

Was Trump threatening Springsteen by telling him that “we’ll all see how it goes for him!” when he returns to this country?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

Onto the Democrats. Factor out but a minor percentage of both their legislators and supporters and you have a party of pragmatists. This writer’s definition of a pragmatist is the guy standing in front of the firing squad asking for a blindfold. The leaders of this party believe all that matters is to get out and vote… nothing more… oh sorry, except to send donations. Let’s go back to 2006 when, during the height of the Bush-Cheney ( or is it Cheney-Bush?). The Cabal’s phony war and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Democrats took over the House of Representatives. Rep. John Conyors, he of the Judiciary Committee, had promised a year or so earlier “Once we take over the House and I am chair of the Judiciary Committee, we are going to have major hearings on the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.” Then, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave the order that “The hearings are OFF the table.” Bye Bye all chances of holding the Cabal responsible for, in my 70+ years of existence, the equally horrific foreign policy act by my nation as the Vietnam War!

So, in my little hamlet of Port Orange, Florida, population at the time of around 60,000, we organized weekly street corner demonstrations against the Iraq invasion and occupation. We stayed at it from before the 2004 presidential election right up until Obama became the candidate in 2008. Once he was the front runner of his party, the 25-30 folks we had on that corner each Tuesday at rush hour now became three or four of us stalwarts. The BS Democratic Party mouthpiece MoveOn.org refused to get behind  regular street demonstrations. No, now it was time to spend all energy in getting Barack elected. Meanwhile, many of us on what is called The True Left wanted Medicare for All. Mr. Obama said he liked the idea of a Public Option, which in essence was just that in a more pragmatic (here we go again) manner. Then, when Obama was out receiving campaign donations of $21+ million vs. $7+ million  for John McCain from the Health Care and Insurance Industries, he changed course. No public option on the table for his Bully Pulpit. Just the Affordable Care Act, another (here we go again) pragmatic program, which helped stop some of the bleeding but not the cause of the wound.

Bill Clinton gave us the Welfare Reform Act which made those folks in dire need feel like interlopers inside the empire. He and his wife really screwed up any idea for Medicare for All, didn’t they as well? You see, those who walk the line between doing good and doing what the empire wants always fall on their faces… or rather their supporters do. Thus, Obama as President during the middle of the terrible Sub Prime Crisis left it up to his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to run his “best and the brightest” meetings while Barack went home to dinner with his family. Emanuel twisted arms and came up with more TARP money gifts to the Wall Street predators, instead of what Ralph Nader and many conservatives and progressives demanded: Putting the toxic Wall Street companies into Receivership. Uncle Sam could have paid pennies on the dollar for those shitty assets, and then sold them to highest bidders down the road.

When it came to the phony Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Obama and his party leadership did squat about the lies and misinformation the Cabal issued to justify those invasions and occupations. We are still suffering as a nation from that mess. Now we have Trump 2.0 or shall I say Trump-Musk 1 and what will the pragmatists on the other side of the aisle finally do? Will they push out all those empire serving hypocrites from their party and rally Americans for real, viable change? Kamala Harris actually took in more money from the big donors and still lost the election. Her party’s leaders and their lemmings said it was because she was a woman and of mixed race (wasn’t Obama mixed race?). No, she lost because Kamala kept dancing to the same Neocon tune that Sleepy Joe sang to. Working stiffs nationwide could not see any difference between her and Trump 2.0. Harris, Biden, the Clintons, Obama et al. forgot what FDR accomplished to save the Capitalism that they all love, by sticking it to the Super Rich with his New Deal. Because of their failings we can today see how Trump and his party are pushing us back in time to that glorious Gilded Age and 21st Century Feudal America.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Philip A. Faruggio.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

In November 2024, we see similar tremors of doubt and consternation, though the official stance, as expressed by President Joe Biden, is to “accept the choice the country made.”  In the vast, noisy hinterland of social media speculation lie unproven claims that some 20 million votes have gone missing, necessitating a recount.  Ditto problems with failing voting machines.  In a statement of cool dismissive confidence, Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is adamant: “we have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security and integrity of our election infrastructure.”

2016 might have given the Democrats meditative pause as to why Trump was elected.  Even more significantly, why Trump’s election was more apotheosis rather than gnarly distortion.  Instead of vanishing as aberrant over the Biden years, Trumpism has come home to roost in winning, not only the Electoral College but the majority vote by convincing margins.

Much is made of Trump’s pathological campaign against the legitimacy of his loss in 2020, as well as it might.  Less is made, certainly from the centre left and Democratic quarters, of the conspiratorial webbing that served to excuse an appalling electoral performance on behalf of the donkey party and their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton.  Doing so shifted any coherent analysis about loss and misjudgement to plot and the sorcery of disruption – the very sorts of things that Trump would use to such effect after 2020.  Indeed, the seeds of election denialism were already sown in 2016 by the Democrats.  Trump would draw on this shoddy model with vengeful enthusiasm in 2020.

In Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes make the point that the Clinton team took a matter of hours to concoct “the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up… Already, Russian hacking was the centrepiece of the argument.”

In declassified notes provided in September 2020 by the then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the picture of pre-emptive delegitimization becomes vivid.  Clinton, in late July 2016, “had approved a campaign plan to stir a scandal against US Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”  Then Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan “subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the ‘alleged approval by Hillary Clinton July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.’”

Since her loss, Clinton has been impervious to the notion that she lacked sufficient appeal in the electoral race.  Trump was, she has continued to insist, never a legitimate president to begin with.

Other Democrat worthies never deviated from the narrative.  The late Californian Senator Dianne Feinstein was certain in January 2017 that the change in fortunes in the Clinton camp had much to do with the announcement the previous October that the FBI would be investigating Clinton’s private email server.  Typically, the issue of what was exposed was less relevant than the fact of exposure.  The former was irrelevant; the latter, Russian, unpardonable, causal and fundamental.

In June 2019, former President Jimmy Carter went even further, showing that the Democrats would remain indifferent to Trump as a serious electoral phenomenon.  “I think a full investigation would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016,” he stated on a panel hosted by the Carter Center at Leesburg, Virginia.  “He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”  This execrable nonsense was fanned, fed and nurtured by media servitors, to such a degree as to prompt Gerard Baker, currently editor-at-large for the Wall Street Journal, to remark that it was mostly “among the most disturbing, dishonest, and tendentious I’ve ever seen.”

An odd analysis in Politico by David Faris about the latest election suggests that Democrats “have the advantage of introspection” while the Republicans, after losing in 2020, “chose not to look inward and instead descended into a conspiratorial morass of denial and rage that prevented them, at least publicly, from addressing the sources of their defeat.”

Faris misses the mark in one fundamental respect.  The Democrats were, fascinatingly enough, the proto-election denialists.  They did not storm the Capitol in patriotic, costumed moodiness, but they did try to eliminate Trump as an electoral force.  In doing so, they failed to see Trumpland take root under their noses.  His stunning and conclusive return to office demands something far more substantive in response than the amateurish, foamy undergraduate rage that has become the hallmark of a distinct monomania.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

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”.

• READ MORE: Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza ‘betrayal of true feminism’
• ‘All-out catastrophe’: Famine fears as Israeli siege of north Gaza tightens
• Pacific nation leaders look forward to strengthened US relations with Trump
• All in all, Trump’s election is a calamity in he making — Paul Buchanan
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

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 content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

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”.

• READ MORE: Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza ‘betrayal of true feminism’
• ‘All-out catastrophe’: Famine fears as Israeli siege of north Gaza tightens
• Pacific nation leaders look forward to strengthened US relations with Trump
• All in all, Trump’s election is a calamity in he making — Paul Buchanan
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

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 content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

This week on CounterSpin: We talk about what just happened, and corporate media’s role in it, with Julie Hollar, senior analyst at the media watch group FAIR, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas.

Washington Post (7/25/21)

We also hear some of an important conversation we had with political scientist Dorothee Benz the day after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at non-presidential election results.

Featured image: Women’s March to the White House, November 2, 2024 (Creative Commons photo: Amaury Laporte)

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Cambridge, UK — As the voting results started coming in here from Virginia at 4 am (GMT, which is five hours later than Eastern Time in the US), I went to bed, having seen enough to know that Kamala Harris’s  crash campaign for the White House was failing.

I knew what was coming.  I’d experienced it four times already. In 1968 I watched Richard Nixon, the notorious House version of Commie-hunter Sen. Joe McCarthy rouse what he dubbed  the “Silent Majority” of right-wing white bigots and pro-Vietnam War super-patriots and defeated Hubert Humphrey (an earlier VP who the Democratic party chose as their nominee when their incumbent president after, Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek re-election).

There was a sense of hopelessness on the left the morning after Nixon’a election.

It happened again in 1980, with the surprise win by Republican Ronald Reagan, who defeated incumbent Jimmy Carter.  That morning, I got up early and went down to Broadway from my 11th-floor apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Walking down the largely empty sidewalk like a zombie, I passed a few people headed the other way, their faces looking similarly shell-shell shocked, until a neighborhood friend, John Hess, a spritely, gray-bearded retiree N.Y. Times staffer, bounded up to me cheerfully. “Isn’t it great?” He said with a smile. “The Republicans also took the Senate!”

“What’s so great about that?” I asked, astonished that this radical leftist journalist would say such a thing.

“Because,” he explained, “If the Democrats control Congress, Reagan can’t blame all his disasters on them. Now he won’t have the ability to blame anyone but himself!”

Actually, in the event, Reagan managed to serve out two terms, and even accomplished some positive things including negotiating with House Majority Leader Democrat Tip O’Neill a rescue of the underfunded Social Security program and ending the Cold War and (at least temporarily) the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.

Then, of course, there was the Supreme Court which in 2000 stole the election for George W Bush by halting the vote counting in Florida, where it was clear that Democratic Vice President Al Gore, who had already won the popular vote, would also have won the state and its Electoral College total. Instead, the feckless top court gave the White House to Bush and Dick Cheney.

And finally there was the night Donald Trump stunned the pundits and himself by winning the White House and defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

So waking up Wednesday morning to see that Trump would be president for another nightmare four-term had for me a definite “Groundhog Da” feel to it — but without the guy-gets-girl happy ending to it).

Actually, this time Trump 2.0 is worse than those four earlier Republican wins. This time the Republican president will have solid control of both houses of Congress, with a Senate so overwhelmingly Republican that it will be able to pass almost any piece of legislation without Democrats blocking it, and will likely remain in Republican hands for Trump’s full term.  This time around, the Supreme Court too is solidly controlled 6-3 by hard-right justices, and Trump has made it clear that every cabinet office and every government agency will be run  by “loyal’ lackeys of his choosing, with even civil service employees either replaced or cowed into submission — including at such normally independent agencies as the Pentagon, CIA, Justice Department and EPA.  Even the late irrepressible John Hess would have  had a hard time finding a bright side to this Election Day outcome.

Nonetheless I’m going to give it a try.

First a reality check:  What we see in the 2024 election result is that a majority of Americans — men and women, rich and poor, white and people of color, educated and uneducated,  religious and atheist —  are either ready to gamble on a self-involved sociopathic, racist and misogynist criminal billionaire with anger issues or are too concerned with just getting by with their daily lives  to to worry about elections that never seem to change their lives for the better or that even make them harder. Analysis of the voting shows that a huge percentage of late voting younger people went for Trump. And a tidal wave of women voting for Harris didn’t materialize. More women voted than men, as usual, but plenty of them went for the pussy-grabbing rapist Trump. Trump also did better with Black men than he did in 2016 and 2024 and significantly improved his tally among Latinos (or as he calls them “Hispanics”). In the end Harris’s larger share of women voters was the same as Trump’s larger share of  men, making the predicted gender war a wash-out.

Here in the UK, where I am living for the next nine months, I can see what the results of such so-called populist voting trends can be. British voters in 1979 elected a hard-right Prime Minister named Margaret Thatcher and allowed her and her Conservative Party to set off a seismic shift of the country’s politics away from social democracy and a rather classical conservatism into a two-party Neo-liberal dystopia where both parties accepted the notion that capitalism, unfettered markets, and a coddled business elite managing things was the best option for society.

This  narrowed political playing field has led over the ensuing decades to a long period British economic doldrums, and to a turning away by Brits from the rest of Europe, as resentment and hostility towards outsiders, including eastern Europeans, and especially people from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean — all of them willing to work for less and to leave countries that had it even worse — availed themselves of the lack of borders across Europe  to flock to the UK. This latter phenomenon led to the narrow victory of a referendum that resulted inBritain’s removing itself from the European Union. Called Brexit, this abrupt anti-immigrant “secession” has wreaked havoc on the nation’s economy and living standards, as well as the operation of key services like the country’s once vaunted National Health System.

Just this past July, British voters, frustrated  with a country and government where “nothing works anymore,” turned out the Conservatives after 15 straight years of Tory rule and handed a landslide win to the Labour Party and its new Prime Minister Keir Starmer.  How that new government will fare in its effort to right the ship of state and its stagnating economy, given the incredible decades-long disinvestment and privatization it is hoping to reverse, remains to be seen.

I suspect the US, under a second Trump administration, this time emboldened by a political realignment at least as profound as was Thatcher’s 1979 win in the UK, will soon be similarly strip-mined and privatized.

The one bright spot, however, if President-re-elect Trump, a shameless liar, can be taken at his word, would be if he actually were to brings an end to the decade of US military aid political  brinksmanship in pushing Ukraine to break away from neighboring Russia’s sphere of influence and to join NATO, the US-led anti-Russian alliance created way back at the start of the Cold War of he 1950s. Trump says, quite logically, that US efforts to pull Ukraine into NATO, a mutual protection pact whose very existence is an existential threat to Russia, and the Ukraine government’s now ten-year old armed conflict with first its ethic Russian minority and then, when Russia responded by invading Ukraine, with Russia, a leading nuclear power,  has led to a war in which Ukraine’s military is largely underwritten by US arms and financial banking interests. It is a war that the US knows poses a high risk of provoking a devastating and potentially world-ending nuclear conflict between ther world’s two nuclear superpowers.

During the just concluded election campaign, Trump promised to bring an end to that bloody military conflict immediately before even waiting for his second inauguration in January.  He has also promised to end the one-sided slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, though without specifying how.

I am no fan of Trump, but I have to say should he successfully cut short those two bloody conflicts, or even ends the Ukraine war while at least not making things worse in Gaza, his new presidency would be off to a great start. He should follow that up by returning the US to the treaty relationship on nuclear weapons that his Republican predecessor Ronald  Reagan worked out with former Soviet and Russia leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which effectively, if all too briefly,  ended the two countries’ nuclear standoff and raised humanity’s hopes for an end to nuclear weapons altogether. Trump should also follow through with his prior effort to pull the US out of NATO, which long ago morphed into a cover for and participant in US global military actions around the world and simply serves as an excuse for ploughing over a trillion dollars a year into the coffers of the US arms industry.

Martin Luther King, a year to the day before the day in 1968 that he was assassinated (my birthday) he gave a speech at the Riverside Church in New York titled Beyond Vietnam:A Time to End the Silence.” In it he correctly identified the US, at that time conducting a bloody aggressive war in Indochina, as being “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”  It has remained so, Indeed its endless wars and “interventions,” have reportedly killed well over 6 million people, mostly civilians, around the world in the eight decades since WWII.

Trump knows this and has talked of pulling US forces back from the hundreds of places they are based in foreign lands (though that idea was at one point linked by him to the idea of using them against American dissidents here at home — NOT a Great idea!).

He should pull them back and decommission them.

Trump has said on a number of occasions that he does not want wars — that as a businessman, he wants the US to do business with other nations, on a level playing field.  That is a great sentiment, and it’s one that his base, those MAGA voters, some of whom I know and have had conversations with,. Trump should be held to that promise, and should downsize the US military to a size appropriate to a country that is not facing any threat of invasion and that stops meddling militarily in other countries and maintaining bases around the globe. That is a position a lot of Trump’s MAGA backers agree with.

For now though, all we have from President-elect Trump are promises like  “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,” and unless acted upon these cannot be taken seriously. But that said, I have to say the words themselves are welcome, and it’w a promise that I’ve never heard the likes of coming from any other president-elect of either party.. (Okay, Richard Nixon claimed during his first presidential race that he had a “secret plan’ for ending the war in Vietnam, but that “plan” turned out to be to massively carpet-bomb North Vietnam using B-52s. expand the war  into Laos and Cambodia and to ship more US combat troops into the country. Once elected, he kept the war going until he resigned from office in disgrace.)

We on the left are facing an existential crisis with Trump’s election victory but also an opportunity

Supporting the Democrats and their chosen candidate Kamala Harris as a tactical move to preserve freedom to organize and to protest was clearly unsuccessful as her poorly performed campaign did worse than Hillary Clinton did against Trump eight years before. Indeed, she lost not just in the Electoral College tally but in the popular vote, which Clinton at least won.  The Democratic Party has been shown once again to be a pathetic joke as a political opponent. Sen. Bernie Sanders,  who won a resounding re-election to the Senate in Vermont, identified right before Harris’s concession speech on Thursday, the party’s problem:  It is owned by billionaires and moneyed consultants wedded to corporate interests, and is  dismissive or even hostile to the interests of the working class.

But the pathetic showing of third party candidates in this,  as in prior elections,  has shown that building a third party is also a fool’s errand in a country where the political system is structured to prevent them.

That leaves us with the option of building a large movement outside of political parties focussed around broad popular issues that would bring working-class people together common goals like peace and demilitarization, significantly raising the minimum wage, improving and protecting Social Security, making Medicare universal for all ages, passing the Equal Rights Amendment and protecting every women’s right to control her own body and health and seriously addressing the climate crisis.

Trump has made it clear that he wants unrestrained power, without the hindrances of a Constitution or a Congress composed of members who might think for themselves and perform their intended constitutional role as a check and balance on the Executive Branch. Trump’s history of lying, criminality, racism and misogyny and his willingness to appeal to American citizens’ basest instincts are well known. But we are stuck with him. He cannot be defeated in the courts because he has a bunch of sycophants packing the Supreme Court and in the lower level federal courts.  Impeachment cannot happen and is a waste of time and effort. The weakened Congressional Democrats can no longer even put on a impeachment committee hearing this time.

With a mass movement we can pressure Trump and his Congressional supporters to do what they promised. If they go back on those promises, we can work to peel away those people who just voted for him as a “change disrupter,” especially as they begin to discover he really doesn’t give a damn about them.

Meanwhile we need to do the hard work of organize]ing wide support for resisting Trump’s worst ideas — the ones that will harm the defenseless and that will grievously contribute to climate change. For example, we need to support a campaign to protect undocumented people living in the USA from brutal arrest, detention and forced deportation, especially in cases that break up families.  We clearly need to build a mass movement to protect programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.  A key here is that most of Trump’s own voting base depend on those programs and on the Affordable Care Act. Trump and his advisers know this. This is why Trump vowed during his campaign not to cut them. He needs to be held to that promise. And we need to call out every Trump effort to worsen climate change by the reversal of what climate saving measures have been introduced, and by trying to sack or silence those civil service employees responsible for measuring or ameliorating climate change.

Trump, by making this false promises he won’t keep in order to win the election has handed us what we need to organize this same people.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dave Lindorff.

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.

Corporate media may not have all the same goals as MAGA Republicans, but they share the same strategy: Fear works.

Appeals to fear have an advantage over other kinds of messages in that they stimulate the deeper parts of our brains, those associated with fight-or-flight responses. Fear-based messages tend to circumvent our higher reasoning faculties and demand our attention, because evolution has taught our species to react strongly and quickly to things that are dangerous.

This innate human tendency has long been noted by the media industry (Psychology Today, 12/27/21), resulting in the old press adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Politicians, too, are aware of this brain hack (Conversation, 1/11/19)—and no one relies on evoking fear more than once-and-future President Donald Trump (New York Times, 10/1/24).

This is why coverage of issues in this election season have dovetailed so well with the Trump campaign’s lines of attack against the Biden/Harris administration—even in outlets that are editorially opposed, at least ostensibly, to Trumpism.

Scary issues

Corporate media rarely point, as this New York Times graphic (7/24/24) did, that crime has fallen dramatically since 1991, and continued to fall during the Biden/Harris administration.

Take immigration, a topic that could easily be covered as a human interest story, with profiles of people struggling to reach a better life against stark challenges. Instead, corporate media tend to report on it as a “border crisis,” with a “flood” of often-faceless migrants whose very existence is treated as a threat (FAIR.org, 5/24/21).

This is the news business deciding that fear attracts and holds an audience better than empathy does. And that business model would be undermined by reporting that consistently acknowledged that the percentage of US residents who are undocumented workers rose only slightly under the Biden administration, from 3.2% in 2019 to 3.3% in 2022 (the latest year available)—and is down from a peak of 4.0% in 2007 (Pew, 7/22/24; FAIR.org, 10/16/24).

With refugees treated as a scourge in centrist and right-wing media alike, is it any wonder that Trump can harvest votes by promising to do something about this menace? Eleven percent of respondents in NBC‘s exit poll said that immigration was the single issue that mattered most in casting their vote; 90% of the voters in that group voted for Trump.

Crime is another fear-based issue that Trump hammered on in his stump speech. “Have you seen what’s been happening?” he said of Washington, DC (Washington Post, 3/11/24). “Have you seen people being murdered? They come from South Carolina to go for a nice visit and they end up being murdered, shot, mugged, beat up.”

Trump could make such hyperbolic claims sound credible because corporate media had paved the way with alarmist coverage of crime (FAIR.org, 11/10/22). It was rare to see a report that acknowledged, as an infographic in the New York Times (7/24/24) did, that crime has dropped considerably from 2020 to 2024, when it hit a four-decade low (FAIR.org, 7/26/24).

‘Classic fear campaign’

Republicans spent so much on transphobic ads (Truthout, 11/5/04) because they knew voters had been primed by media to fear trans people.

Trans people, improbably enough, are another favorite subject of fear stories for media and MAGA alike. “Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads vilifying transgender people this election cycle,” Truthout (11/5/04) reported, with Trump spending “more money on anti-trans ads than on ads concerning housing, immigration and the economy combined.”

Journalist Erin Reed (PBS NewsHour, 11/2/24) described this as “a classic fear campaign”:

The purpose of a fear campaign is to distract you from issues that you normally care about by making you so afraid of a group of people, of somebody like me, for instance, that you’re willing to throw everything else away because you’re scared.

Transphobia has been a major theme in right-wing media, but has been a prominent feature of centrist news coverage as well, particularly in the New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/11/23). Rather than reporting centered on trans people, which could have humanized a marginalized demographic that’s unfamiliar to many readers, the Times chose instead to present trans youth in particular as a threat—focusing on  “whether trans people are receiving too many rights, and accessing too much medical care, too quickly,” as FAIR noted.

‘Alienating voters’ with ‘progressive agenda’

The New York Times (11/6/24) didn’t want people to vote for Trump—but its reporting contributed to the perception that “an infusion of immigrants” and “a porous southern border” were among “the nation’s urgent problems.”

But rather than examining their own role in promoting the irrational fears that were the lifeblood of the successful Trump campaign, corporate media focused on their perennial electoral scapegoat: the left (FAIR.org, 11/5/21). The New York Times editorial board (11/6/24) quickly diagnosed the Democrats’ problem (aside from sticking with Biden too long):

The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election…. It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system—which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults. If the Democrats are to effectively oppose Mr. Trump, it must be not just through resisting his worst impulses but also by offering a vision of what they would do to improve the lives of all Americans and respond to anxieties that people have about the direction of the country and how they would change it.

It’s a mind-boggling contortion of logic. The Times doesn’t say which aspects of Democrats’ “progressive agenda” were so alienating to people. But the media all agreed—based largely on exit polls—that Republicans won because of the economy and immigration. The “persuasive message” and “vision…to improve the lives of all Americans” that Democrats failed to offer was pretty clearly an economic one. Which is exactly what progressives in the party have been pushing for the last decade: Medicare for All, a wealth tax, a living minimum wage, etc. In other words, if the Democrats had adopted a progressive agenda, it likely would have been their best shot at offering that vision to improve people’s lives.

More likely, the paper was referring to “identity politics,” which has been a media scapegoat for years—indeed, pundits roundly blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump on identity politics (or “political correctness”) (FAIR.org, 11/20/16). Then, as now, it was an accusation without evidence.

‘Democratic self-sabotage’

The Washington Post‘s Matt Bai (11/6/24) thought Trump’s anti-trans ads resonated with “a lot of traditionally Democratic voters who feel like the party is consumed with cultural issues.”

At the Washington Post, columnist Matt Bai‘s answer (11/6/24) to “Where Did Kamala Harris’s Campaign Go Wrong?” was, in part, that “Democrats have dug themselves into a hole on cultural issues and identity politics,” naming Trump’s transphobic ads as evidence of that. (In a Post roundup of columnist opinions, Bai declared that Harris “couldn’t outrun her party’s focus on trans rights and fighting other forms of oppression.”)

At the same time, Bai acknowledged that he does “think of Trump as being equally consumed with identity—just a different kind.” Fortunately for Republicans, Bai and his fellow journalists never take their kind of identity politics as worth highlighting (FAIR.org, 9/18/24).

George Will (10/6/24), a Never Trumper at the Washington Post, chalked up Harris’s loss largely to “the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president.”

Bret Stephens (10/6/24), one of the New York Times‘ set of Never Trumpers, likewise pointed a finger at Democrats’ supposed tilt toward progressives and “identity.” Much like other pundits, Stephens argued that “the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity.”

Of the Harris campaigns’ “tactical missteps,” Stephens’ first complaint was “her choice of a progressive running mate”—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. He also accused the party of a “dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes.” Here he mentioned trans kids’ rights, DEI seminars and “new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive,” none of which Harris vocally embraced.

But underlying all of these arguments is a giant fundamental problem: It’s simply a fantasy (advanced repeatedly by Republicans) that Harris was running on identity politics, or as a radical progressive. News articles (e.g., Slate, 9/5/24; Forbes, 11/5/24) regularly acknowledged that Harris, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, for instance, shied away from centering her gender or ethnic background, or appealing to identity in her campaign.

‘Wary and alienated’

In a rare instance of actually listening to left-wing voices, a New York Times article (10/24/24) focused on pre-election warnings that Harris “risks chilling Democratic enthusiasm by alienating progressives and working-class voters.”

The Times‘ own reporting made Harris’s distancing from progressive politics perfectly clear not two weeks ago, in an article (10/24/24) headlined, “As Harris Courts Republicans, the Left Grows Wary and Alienated.” In a rare example of the Times centering a left perspective in a political article, reporters Nicholas Nehamas and Erica L. Green wrote:

In making her closing argument this month, Ms. Harris has campaigned four times with Liz Cheney, the Republican former congresswoman, stumping with her more than with any other ally. She has appeared more in October with the billionaire Mark Cuban than with Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers and one of the nation’s most visible labor leaders.

She has centered her economic platform on middle-class issues like small businesses and entrepreneurship rather than raising the minimum wage, a deeply held goal of many Democrats that polls well across the board. She has taken a harder-line stance on the border than has any member of her party in a generation and has talked more prominently about owning a Glock than about combating climate change. She has not broken from President Biden on the war Israel is waging in Gaza.

Kamala Harris did not run as a progressive, either in terms of economic policy or identity politics. But to a corporate media that largely complemented, rather than countered, Trump’s fear-based narratives on immigrants, trans people and crime, blaming the left is infinitely more appealing than recognizing their own culpability.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

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 content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

From the start, the Democrats had tied themselves in knots by convincing President Joe Biden that he could not only last the tenure of his office but run against Trump. Doing so, and deriding those wishing to see a change in the guard, created a needless handicap. Throughout late 2023 and early 2024, it became clear that the party worthies were doing their best to shield Biden’s cognitive decline.  The sham was cruelly exposed in the June 27 debate with Trump.

Panic struck the ranks. With little time to regroup, Vice President Harris was close at hand, selected by Biden as the appropriate choice. But Harris landed with a punctured parachute weighed down by the crown of presumptive nomination.  There were to be no opponents (the 2016 challenge of Bernie Sanders against Hillary Clinton which annoyed the party mandarins would not be repeated), no primaries, no effective airing of any challenge. It was easy to forget – at least for many Democrats – that Harris’s 2019 bid for the nomination had been spectacularly poor and costly. An ailing president would also keep his occupancy in the White House, rather than resigning and giving Harris some seat warming preparation.

While the change caused the inevitable rush of optimism, it soon became clear that the ghost of Hillary’s past had been working its demonic magic.  The Harris campaign was unadventurous and safe. All too often, the vice president hoped that messages would reach the outer reaches of the electorate from cocooned comfort, helped by a war chest of fundraising that broke records ($1 billion in less than three months), and a battalion of cheerleading celebrities that suggested electoral estrangement rather than connection.

Then there was the problem as to what those messages were. These, in the end, did not veer much beyond attacking Trump as a threat to democracy, women’s rights and reproductive freedoms. They tended to remain unclear on the issue of economics. From foreign to domestic policy, Harris failed to distinguish herself as one able to depart from the Biden program in her own right. Instead, it was hoped that some organic coalition of anti-Trump Republicans, independents, Black voters, women and American youth would somehow materialise at the ballot box.

In a September 16 meeting with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, longtime allies of the Democratic Party, Harris failed to convince its leaders that she would protect the livelihood and jobs of workers better than Trump. Within a matter of days, the union publicly revealed that it would not be endorsing Harris as Democratic presidential candidate, the first since 1996.

Her interviews were minimal, her exposure to the outside treated with utmost delicacy. The Republicans, on the other hand, were willing to get their hands dirty with an extensive ground campaign that yielded electoral rewards in such battleground states as Pennsylvania. The Early Vote Action effort of conservative activist Scott Presler proved impressive in encouraging voter registration and increasing absentee and early vote counts. His efforts in securing votes for Trump from Pennsylvania’s Amish community were strikingly successful.

Trump, in sharp contrast to his opponent, was so exposed to the point of being a potential assassination target on two occasions.  He showed the electorate he was worth the tag. He personalised with moronic panache. He babbled and raged, and made sure he, as he always does, dominated the narrative. Alternative media outlets were courted. Most of all, he focused on the breadbasket issues: the cost of groceries, housing and fuel; the perceived terrors of having a lax border policy. He also appealed to voters content with reining in the war making instincts so natural to Harris and neoconservatives on both sides of the aisle.

Fundamentally, the Democrats fell for the old trick of attacking Trump’s demagogy rather than teasing out their own policies. The Fascist cometh. The inner Nazi rises. Misogyny rampant. Racism throbbing. This came with the inevitable belittling of voters. You cast your ballot for him, you are either an idiot, a fascist, or both. Oh, and he was just weird, said the unknown and already forgotten ear-scratching Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, whatever that means in a land where weird is so frequent as to make it its most endearing quality.

It is remarkable that Trump, a convicted felon, twice impeached in office, a person so detached from the empirical, the logical, and the half-decent, would be electable in the first place. Even more remarkable is that such a figure has won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. The glorious Republic likes its show and treats elections like marketing exercises.  Its defenders often pretend that those reaching its highest office are not mirrors but transcendent figures to emulate.  Trump – in all his cocksure hustling and slipshod approach to regulation and convention – shows many in the electorate that the defect and the defective can go far.

A few final lessons. The Democrats would do best to listen to those who would otherwise vote for them.  Focus on the economy. Talk about the price of eggs and milk. Ditch the lexicon on ill-defined terms of supposedly useful criticism such as fascism, a word the users almost always misunderstand. And always be careful about pundits and pollsters who predict razor small margins in elections.  Polls, and people, lie.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

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.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Philip A. Faruggio.

The leading Cook Islands environmental lobby group says that if Donald Trump wins the United States elections — and he seemed to be on target to succeed as results were rolling in tonight — he will push back on climate change negotiations made since he was last in office.

As voters in the US cast their votes on who would be the next president, Trump or US Vice-President Kamala Harris, the question for most Pacific Islands countries is what this will mean for them?

“If Trump wins, it will push back on any progress that has been made in the climate change negotiations since he was last in office,” said Te Ipukarea Society’s Kelvin Passfield.

• READ MORE:  US presidential election holds high stakes for Pacific relations
• How the US election may affect Pacific Island nations
• Donald Trump ‘unfit to lead’ – vote for Harris, warns New York Times
• Other US presidential elections reports
• View the complete CNMI results

“It won’t be good for the Pacific Islands in terms of US support for climate change. We have not heard too much on Kamala Harris’s climate policy, but she would have to be better than Trump.”

The current President Joe Biden and his administration made some efforts to connect with Pacific leaders.

Massey University’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies senior lecturer Dr Anna Powles said a potential win for Harris could be the fulfilment of the many “promises” made to the Pacific for climate financing, uplifting economies of the Pacific and bolstering defence security.

Dr Powles said Pacific leaders want Harris to deliver on the Pacific Partnership Strategy, the outcomes of the two Pacific Islands-US summits in 2022 and 2023, and the many diplomatic visits undertaken during President Biden’s presidency.

Diplomatic relationships
The Biden administration recognised Cook Islands and Niue as sovereign and independent states and established diplomatic relationships with them.

The Biden-Harris government had pledged to boost funding to the Green Climate Fund by US$3 billion at COP28 in the United Arab Emirates.

Harris has said in the past that climate change is an existential threat and has also promised to “tackle the climate crisis with bold action, build a clean energy economy, advance environmental justice, and increase resilience to climate disasters”.

Dr Powles said that delivery needed to be the focus.

She said the US Elections would no doubt have an impact on small island nations facing climate change and intensified geopolitics.

Dr Powles said it came as “no surprise” that countries such as New Zealand and Australia had increasingly aligned with the US, as the Biden administration had been leveraging strategic partnerships with Australia, New Zealand, and Japan since 2018.

She said a return to Trump’s leadership could derail ongoing efforts to build security architecture in the Pacific.

Pull back from Pacific
There are also views that Trump would pull back from the Pacific and focus on internal matters, directly impacting his nation.

For Trump, there is no mention of the climate crisis in his platform or Agenda47.

This is in line with the former president’s past actions, such as withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2019, citing “unfair economic burdens” placed on American workers and businesses.

Trump has maintained his position that the climate crisis is “one of the great scams of all time”.

Republished with permission from the Cook Islands News and RNZ Pacific.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

With Election Day for one of the most consequential United States presidential races in recent history underway, Pasifika communities on both sides of the Pacific Ocean are considering how a new administration could impact US-Pacific relations.

Roy Tongilava, a public policy professional and Pacific community advocate in the United States, hopes to see improved US-Pacific relations under either a Harris or Trump administration.

“I’m not an expert in foreign affairs, but my hope would be that either a presidency under Harris or under Trump would continue to build those relations, to build those investments, to really help not only combat climate change but also to really aid in the Pacific development, which is inherently connected to what I believe is the Pacific Islander American experience,” he said.

• Watch the full PMN interview with Roy Tongilava

• READ MORE: Al Jazeera US elections live updates
• How the US election may affect Pacific Island nations
• Donald Trump ‘unfit to lead’ – vote for Harris, warns New York Times
• Other US presidential elections reports
• View the complete CNMI results

New Zealand political commentator and former chair of the National Party’s Pacific Blues group, Christian Malietoa-Brown, is backing Donald Trump in the presidential race.

He says the Pacific is caught in a “tug-of-war” between major powers like the US and China, with Australia playing an increasingly significant role.

“For me, I think in terms of long-term investment, Trump likes to prevent war by showing strength . . .  I think they [the US] will strategically put some investments here just because they don’t want China running around too much in this area for defence reasons.

“Under the Biden administration, we saw record investment down this way in the Pacific region, obviously to try and push away China’s influence in the region,” Malietoa-Brown says.

• Watch the full PMN interview with Christian Malietoa-Brown

Picking a big player
“So you have China, you have America, you have Russia, you have India that’s coming up big,” Malietoa-Brown said.

“And if I had to pick a big player to be in charge of the world, I would pretty much stick to America as it is right now, because that’s the devil we know, rather than someone else that we don’t know. And that’s probably purely a selfish thing.”

Tongilava agrees that the Joe Biden administration has been positive for the Pacific region in terms of investment.

“The Biden administration has pumped record investment into the Pacific to a number of things, infrastructure, education, all of that. Ultimately, though, to try and cool off and push away China’s advances towards this region.

“We’ve seen Vice-President Harris during her time as Vicep-President really commit to climate change as well as building relations within the Pacific region,” he said.

Education concerns
For Tongilava, who is part of the South Pacific Islander Organization (SPIO), a nonpartisan non-profit organisation that champions education and workforce development for Pacific youth, this election has serious implications for youth.

“Our mission is laser focused on enhancing college access, college retention, and degree completion for Native Hawai’ian and Pacific Islander students throughout our college systems,” Tongilava said.

“A lot of our work has focused on expanding educational opportunity and workforce development for young Pacific Islander students.

“In terms of education, I think it is crucial that Pacific Islanders turn out today in support of the policies specifically that may hinder or create opportunity for their families and for their communities,” Tongilava said.

He said it was crucial that Pacific Islanders vote in support of the specific policies that might hinder or create opportunities for their families and their communities.

Tongilava is concerned about Trump’s proposal to dismantle the US Department of Education, noting that such a move would disproportionately harm communities like the Pacific Islanders, who often rely on federal support for educational programmes.

“This raises additional questions around what role does the federal government play within our school systems here within states and at the local level. For many Pacific Islander Americans, we live in under-resourced communities,” Tongilava said.

Republished from Pacific Media Network with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

We are all by now inured to liberals’ adaptability to the most alarming evils of the US polity: wars of aggression abroad, mushrooming homelessness, tens of millions with little or no healthcare coverage, failing schools, social/cultural dysfunction and despair—all just part of a day’s work in the standard, narrow lane of establishment conservative/liberal discourse, but shocking and disorienting to anyone outside that Beltway of complacency and business as usual. As ghastly as those injustices are, none of them comes close to the staggering evil of this genocide recorded in real time, in the gruesome literality of daily and ever more sickening social media videos.

Yet … the liberal class of this country has now surpassed itself in depravity and callousness by fielding a candidate for president who has funded and presided over this horror: Kamala Harris, mass murderer of children. Seemingly sane if smug urban hipsters and academics urge us, with their customarily curled lips of condescension, to vote to ratify this monstrosity by casting a ballot for this unspeakable genocidaire. People who could not imagine campaigning for school shooter for mayor are unruffled in their flacking for a child murderer to the hundredth power of that—and for the presidency of the United States.

Even the habitual liberal tolerance for everyday injustice and suffering has reached its limit with the maimed, starved, and blasted children of Gaza. Even if the chronic hypocrites and double talkers of the liberal class can cross that red line, the rest of us must stand up, once and for all, and say as one: not for us—not one step further into the greatest of human evils: the mass slaughter of the innocents.

Every other issue and pseudo-issue that arises in this campaign recedes into insignificance before this unimaginable horror. Although tens of millions of Americans will cross that red line today, if we as a species are to preserve even the frailest hope of redemption, the slenderest reed of conscience or decency, at least some of us cannot follow. We must draw and re-draw that line, brightly and firmly, and challenge others to follow us in declining to cross over it—to cross over irrevocably into complicity in that “wasteland of garbage, rubble, and human remains” (Francesca Albanese, UN Rapporteur for Palestine) that final graveyard of the human spirit, of any last hope of speaking of humanity and civilization in the same breath.

We must then, follow the brave lead of Kshama Sawant (long-time socialist Seattle City Council member) and the Michigan Abandon Harris founder Hassan Abdel Salam in declaring: Here we stand—we refuse to cross that line—we can do no other. Kamala Harris and the Democrats must be punished at the polls on Tuesday—they cannot, must not, be rewarded for their genocidal assault on the desperate, destitute refugees of Gaza. The slogans of the human among us must be: Defeat Harris! Vote No on Genocide!

That no vote could take any form: leaving the presidential ballot blank, voting for or writing in the name of Jill Stein or Cornel West, or any vote except a vote for Harris.

The cries of the children of Gaza should be ringing around the world as a caution and a call—a call to return from the brink of irreversible savagery, a call to salvage a last best hope for “one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos.” (E. M. Forster). Today you can answer that call by voting against Kamala Harris and never looking back. 

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William Kaufman.

The editorial board of The New York Times has demolished Donald Trump in a single paragraph calling on readers to vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris in today’s US elections.

The editorial, published on Saturday, was only the Times’ latest attack on the former president in the run-up to the election, but the searing indictment was all the more brutal for its brevity.

• READ MORE: US elections: Editorial writers at LA Times, Washington Post resign after billionaire owners block Kamala Harris endorsements
• Other US presidential elections reports

The 10-line editorial simply said:

“You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.”

The dismissal of Trump by The Times was in contrast to two other major US newspapers, both owned by billionaires — The Washington Post and the LA Times — which last month controversially refused to make an editorial call.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

She made it clear in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, again at her televised debate with Donald Trump a few weeks later, and in all her interviews since.

Vice-President Kamala Harris, if or when elected the 47th United States president, will continue the centre-right policies of her recent predecessors, especially her current boss, President Joe Biden.

This likely means that efforts to address income equality and poverty, to abandon policies that beget violence overseas, and to confront the latticework of discrimination that affects Americans of colour and Black women especially, will be limited at best.

• READ MORE: Donald Trump ‘unfit to lead’ – vote for Harris, warns New York Times
• Other US presidential elections reports

If Harris wins today’s election, her being a Black and South Asian woman in the most powerful office in the world will not mean much to marginalised people anywhere, because she will wield that power in the same racist, sexist and Islamophobic ways as previous presidents.

“I’m not the president of Black America. I’m the president of the United States of America,” President Barack Obama had said on several occasions during his presidency when asked about doing more for Black Americans while in office. As a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris is essentially doing the same.

And as it was the case with Obama’s presidency, this is not good news for Black Americans, or any other marginalised community.

Take the issue of housing.

Blanket housing grant
Harris’s proposed $25,000 grant to help Americans buy homes for the first time is a blanket grant, one that in a housing market historically tilted towards white Americans, will invariably discriminate against Black folks and other people of colour.

Harris’s campaign promise does not even discern between “first-time buyers” whose parents and siblings already own homes, and true “first-generation” buyers who are more likely not white, and do not have any generational wealth.

It seems Harris wants to appear committed to helping “all Americans”, even if it means her policies would primarily help (mostly white) Americans already living middle-class lives. Any real chance for those among the working class and the working poor to have access to the three million homes Harris has promised is between slim and none.

Harris’s pledges about reproductive rights are equally non-specific and thus less than reassuring to those who already face discrimination and erasure.

She says, if elected president, she would “codify Roe v Wade”. Every Democratic president since Jimmy Carter has made such a promise and yet failed to keep it.

Even if Congress were to pass such a law, the far right would challenge this law in court. Even if the federal courts decided to upload such a law, the Supreme Court decisions that followed between 1973 and 2022 gave states the right to restrict abortion based on fetus viability, meaning that most restrictions already in place in many states would remain.

And with half the states in the US either banning abortion entirely or severely restricting it, codification of Roe — if it ever actually materialises — would at best reset the US to the precarity around reproductive rights that has existed since 1973.

Less acccess to resources
Even if Harris miraculously manages to keep her promise, American women of colour, and women living in poverty, will still have less access to contraceptives, to abortions, and to prenatal and neonatal care, because all Roe ever did was to make such care “legal”.

The law never made it affordable, and certainly never made it so that all women had equal access to services in every state in the union.

Given that she is poised to become America’s first woman/woman of colour/Black woman president, Harris’s vague and wide-net promises on reproductive rights, which would do little to help any women, but especially marginalised women, are damning.

Sure, it is good that Harris talks about Black girls and women like the late Amber Nicole Thurman who have been denied reproductive rights in states like Georgia, with deadly results. But her words mean nothing without a clear action plan.

Where Harris failed the most of all, however, is tackling violence — overwhelmingly targeting marginalised, sidelined, silenced and criminalised folks — in the US and overseas.

During a live and televised interview with billionaire Oprah Winfrey in September, Harris expanded on the revelation she made during her earlier debate with Trump that she is a gun owner.

“If somebody breaks into my house they’re getting shot,” Harris said with a smile. “I probably should not have said that,” she swiftly added. “My staff will deal with that later.”

Grabbing attention of gun-owners
The vice-president seemed confident that her remark would eventually be seen by pro-gun control democrats as a necessary attempt at grabbing the attention of gun-owning, centre-right voters, who could still be dissuaded from voting for Trump.

Nonetheless, her casual statement about the use of lethal force revealed much more than her desire to secure the votes of “sensible”, old-school right wingers. It illuminated the blitheness with which Harris takes the issue of the US as a violent nation and culture.

It is hard to believe Harris as president would be an advocate for “common sense” measures seeking “assault weapons bans, universal background checks, red flag laws” when she talks so casually about shooting people.

Her decision to treat gun violence as yet another issue for calculated politicking is alarming, especially when Black folk — including Black women — face death by guns at disproportionate rates, particularly at the hands of police officers and white vigilantes.

Despite Trump’s disgusting claims, Harris is a Black woman. Many Americans assume she would do more to protect them than other presidents. However, her dismissive attitude towards gun violence shows that President Harris — regardless of her racial background — would not offer any more security and safety to marginalised communities, including Black women, than her predecessors.

The assumption that as a part-Black, part-South Asian president, Harris would curtail American violence that maims and kills Black, brown and Asian bodies all over the world also appears to be baseless.

In repeatedly saying that she “will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”, Harris has made clear that she has every intention to continue with the lethal, racist, imperialistic policies of her Democratic and Republican predecessors, without reflection, recalibration or an ounce of remorse.

Carnage in Gaza
Just look at the carnage in Gaza she has overseen as vice-president.

Despite saying multiple times that she and Biden “have been working around the clock” for a ceasefire in Gaza, the truth is that Biden and Harris have not secured a ceasefire simply because they do not want one.

Harris as president will be just as fine with Black, brown, and Asian lives not mattering in the calculations of her future administration’s foreign policy, as she has been as vice-president and US senator.

Anybody voting for Harris in this election — including yours truly — should be honest about why. Sure, there is excitement around having a woman — a biracial, Black and South Asian woman at that — as American president for the first time in history. This excitement, combined with her promise of “we’re not going back” in reference to Trump’s presidency, and many pledges to protect what’s left of US democracy,  provide many Americans with enough reason to support the Harris-Walz ticket.

Yet, some seem to be supporting Kamala Harris under the impression that as a Black and South Asian woman, she would value the lives of people who look like her, and once elected, support marginalised people much better than her predecessors.

This is a delusion.

Just like Obama once did, Harris wants to be president of the United States of America. She has no intention of being the President of “Black America” or the marginalised. She made this clear, over and again, throughout her campaign, and through her work as vice-president to Joe Biden.

There is a long list of reasons to vote for Harris in this election, but the assumption that her presidency would be supportive of the rights and struggles of the marginalised, simply because of her identity, should not be on that list.

Donald Earl Collins, professorial lecturer at the American University in Washington, DC, is the author of Fear of a “Black” America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience (2004). This article was first published by Al Jazeera.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The criteria for winning a presidential debate is very simple: the candidate who fumbles less, makes less mistakes, avoids too many verbal gaffes, etc., who is able to present a rosy picture for the future, and, who believes in people’s “ambition, the aspirations, [and] the dreams,” is the winner — provided all bullshitting is done with a serious face.

However, it’s entirely a different matter whether that person has any genuine solutions to the problems majority of the people face.

Exactly eight years ago, first time in US history of 240 years, a woman had a chance to reach the highest office — Hillary Clinton won popular votes by almost 3 million votes, but that rare opportunity was snatched away by the Electoral College. The victory went to Donald Trump, a slowly evolving fascist. It is to be remembered that Clinton was not that woman progressives have been waiting for.

This time, another woman, Kamala Harris, is in the race for presidency. Her opponent is none other than Trump. Harris was not in the competition but got her opportunity when the Democratic establishment realized, after the Biden/Trump debate, that the horse they have been trying to steady for three and a half years cannot any more stand on its own, and could give up any moment.

Thus, Joe Biden was pushed aside with a tribute that he left the race for a second term out of patriotic duty. Everyone knows that almost no one gives up power, whether s/he is an authoritarian or a “democrat,” without a rough push.

Kamala is the in-girl

Kamala is the in-girl — so many love and support her, not only most of the Democrats but also some prominent Republicans! Within 36 hours of Biden’s decision not to run, and his nominating of Harris as his successor, Harris campaign raised $100 million that jumped to $310 in less than two weeks, with new donors contributing two-thirds of the amount. By September 6, the number had nearly doubled to $615 million. Andrew Byrnes, a tech policy strategist and Harris fundraiser, said the amount he raised for Kamala in one week was double the amount he raised for Biden in a whole year.

In two months, the amount rose to $1 billion. No other presidential candidate has accumulated such a huge amount in such a short period!

Trump is no match for Harris in fundraising despite the fact that his campaign received $100 million from Miriam Adelson who likes Trump so much that she said “Book of Trump”¹ should be added to the Bible, i.e. the Old Testament. Trump allied PAC also got $150 million from Timothy Mellon. Trump’s equally nasty buddy Elon Musk has contributed $76 million.

Trump is the best thing that has happened to the Democratic Party. Most Democrats never tire of ridiculing him. This enables them and the Democrat-leaning news media to keep their supporters busy in Trump’s antics and eccentricities and thus saves the party from answering hard questions.

MSNBC is also known as MSDNC or Democratic National Committee mouthpiece. MSNBC is a cheerleader for the Democrats. Biden and Harris regularly watch MSNBC’s Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. “A Jacobin analysis of six months of its Gaza coverage reveals an unflagging role cheering on Israel’s genocide.”

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder and billionaire, is backing Kamala because he wants to get rid of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Billionaire Mark Cuban endorsed Harris too for the same reason: dump Khan.

Sheryl Sandberg is “thrilled to support” Kamala,² because

She is an accomplished leader, a fierce advocate of abortion rights, and the strongest candidate to lead our country forward.

Ron Conway, a billionaire, has asked tech community to join hands to salvage “our democracy” by getting behind Kamala, whom he has known “for decades” to prevent Trump’s reentry into White House. Conway says she is an “advocate for the tech ecosystem since the day we met.”

Melinda French Gates ($13 million), Reed Hastings (Netflix), George Soros and Alex Soros, Vinod Khosla, Jeffrey Katzenberg (former president of Walt Disney Studios), Bill Gates ($50 million), and other billionaires numbering 81 (or more) have joined the Kamala bandwagon, whereas, Trump has 52 billionaires with him.

Billionaires’ bribes count. Harris, who was with Biden’s plan of raising capital gains tax from 23.8% to 44.6%, opted for 33%, instead.

More than 90 business leaders, including over a dozen billionaires, wrote and signed an endorsement letter to Harris.

“Her election is the best way to support the continued strength, security, and reliability of our democracy and economy. … [She] ensure[s] American businesses can compete and win in the global market. … she will strive to give every American the opportunity to pursue the American dream.”

These billionaire and multimillionaire business people have nothing to do with democracy. The main thrust of the letter is US “businesses can compete and win in the global market,” under Harris, that is, the US government either diplomatically or through military force opens up foreign markets for them like US Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open up for business in 1853. The other fallacy is that Kamala will try to provide people with “the opportunity to pursue the American dream.”

A few corporations are controlling most businesses in US. People are free to dream but whose dreams get realized is decided by the people in power.

Many US presidents, have warned about the increasing corporate power and its harmful effect on country. Thomas Jefferson had hoped in 1816 to “crush” the corporate power which was challenging government and defying laws. Instead the corporations crushed the government power and as journalist and novelist Theodore Dreiser puts it, “the corporations are the government.” (China is a capitalist country but the government controls the capitalists; this is anathema to the US; it wants China to go the US way.)

Women are elated with Harris entering the race for two main reasons: one is that someone from their gender has a chance to win and the other is Harris’ support for abortion. Sadly, most of these women have no Palestinian and Lebanese women and children on their mind.

Porn actors, some of them, are spending over $100,000 in seven swing states in support of Harris because they fear Trump presidency and Project 2025 will ban the porn industry. Harris should thank them but should ask them to stop violence and degradation of women in many of their videos.

Jeff Bridges extended his support to Kamala who is “just so certainly our girl.” He proudly proclaimed: “I’m white, I’m a dude, and I’m for Harris.” Bridges was a part of White Dudes for Harris Zoom call; over 180,000 joined in and raised about $4 million for her campaign. The invitation to join in was based on: “Are you a white guy who believes in science, human rights, and democracy?”

There have been several similar events: such as Latinas for Harris; White Women: Answer the Call; the Black Women Zoom; Caribbean-Americans for Harris; South Asian Women for Harris; Disabled Voters for Harris; Black Men for Harris; Win With Black Women; and South Asian Men for Harris.

Salman Rushdie, an author, joined the South Asian Men for Harris virtual meet and declared he’s in for Harris “1,000 per cent.”³ One could understand Rushdie’s worry as a writer because if Trump wins and turns dictator, of which there are great chances, then he and his ministers, like Elon Musk, won’t tolerate any kind of criticism. The Kamala government would let them write in small publications and press which have limited reach and do not disturb or threaten the ruling class and the system.

Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift is for Kamala too because “She is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”

Billionaire Swift resides in her own bubble and is unaware that, until now the US has been led by calm leaders, but most people have achieved nothing but decline.

In 1982, when the Forbes 400 list was initiated, one could join the list with $100 million ($300 million in today’s money). There were only 13 billionaires then. Today, you need eleven times that amount or $3.3 billion to be one of 400 wealthy in US. So, 400 billionaires made it to the list but 415 individuals couldn’t make it, including Oprah Winfrey who has $3 billion, less than the required $3.3 billion.

What about the rest of the people? A whopping 37% of people in US have less than $400 in savings!

Singer-songwriter Beyonce joined Kamala at a rally in Houston to extend her support. Many celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eminem, Bruce Springsteen, Patti LaBelle, Jennifer Lopez, Jamie Lee Curtis, George Clooney,⁴ and Sarah Jessica Parker (who is voting for Kamala for 31 things, including “For our military, past and currently serving” but not for peace or ceasefire in Gaza).

Dick Cheney, the Vice President in George W. Bush regime and one of the major architects of the Iraq War, a Republican, has also announced that he’ll vote for Kamala Harris.

“[There had] never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump”

“He [Trump] tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.” “He can never be trusted with power again.”

“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution.” “That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris.”

Liz Cheney, a Republican and Dick Cheney’s daughter, supports Harris too, and joined her campaign events thrice in early October. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , the progressive supporters and Democrats like Harris, are campaigning for her but have not been invited to appear with Harris, as yet.

Liz Cheney criticized Trump: “He is petty, he is vindictive, and he is cruel.” If she had not mentioned Trump’s name, one would have assumed she was talking about her dad Dick Cheney who is not any better, in any respect, but is worst than Trump –until now. Liz Cheney also added: “Violence does not and must never determine who rules us. Voters do.”

Trump called Dick Cheney (whose approval rating, when he left office, was mere 13%) a “King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars,” and blasted both father- daughter duo on his TruthSocial account.

“… Her father, Dick, was a leader of our ridiculous journey into the Middle East, where Trillions of Dollars were spent, millions of people were killed – and for what? NOTHING! Well, today, these two fools, because the Republican Party no longer wants them, endorsed the most Liberal Senator in U.S. Senate, further Left than even Pocahontas or Crazy Bernie Sanders – Lyin’ Kamala Harris. What a pathetic couple that is, both suffering gravely from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Good Luck to them both!!!”

Trump is correct about Dick Cheney. He was George H.W. Bush’s Defense Secretary when US went to war against Iraq and destroyed that country. Dick Cheney was Vice President of Bush Jr., when US devastated Afghanistan in 2001, and again went to war against Iraq, in 2003.

Trump lies a great deal but then every now and then he also shows a mirror of the US empire, and its imperialist crimes. Trump once told Bill O’Reilly, “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think — our country’s so innocent?” Or just recently he said: Trillions of Dollars were spent, millions of people were killed. Now this kind of talk can’t be conducive to people running the empire because they suffer from spectrophobia.

238 staffers from four previous Republican governments and many more, including John Negroponte, one of the criminal minds of US imperialism, endorsed Kamala. Barbara Pierce Bush (daughter of former Republican president George W. Bush) is supporting Kamala with the hope the US moves “forward and protect women’s rights.”

Why so many wealthy and powerful people have gotten behind Kamala? The reasons, as we have seen vary, but the most important one is that Kamala will maintain the statue quo. She’s not going to make any drastic changes, but just the cosmetic type.

On the other hand, many rich, and not very rich, in the ruling class are scared of Trump’s unpredictable nature. The wealthy class may benefit much more under Trump than under Harris. In 2017, Trump lowered the corporate tax rate from (Obama government’s) 35% to 21% and corporations benefited a lot. (Biden raised it to 28% and not the 35% it used to be during his vice presidency.)

Trump may concentrate on domestic issues rather than waging foreign wars; but, then if something triggers him, or he is incited by his aides, or perceives a threat from foreign leader(s), then he may go unhinged.

Biden praised Liz Cheney’s “courage” to appear with Harris. “I admire her. Her dad and I worked together a long, long time.” Biden, like Cheneys, loves violence and war. Republicans and Democrats working together can screw the people within and without the US. It becomes so much easier to wage a war against “foreign enemy” when both parties are working together.

Trump will probably do within the US, what the US has been doing to the world for several decades. He will unleash the army on his opponents and critics. Here is Trump:

“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within, Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”⁵

Irony

In 2021, Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance had portrayed Vice President Kamala Harris and other women Democrats as, “a bunch of childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives.”

During the presidential debate in September 2024, Trump falsely charged Haitians residing in Springfield, Ohio, of “eating the dogs … the cats … the pets of the people that live there.”

On October 31, Trump said “Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.”

On October 27, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made racist fun of Latino people by saying “These Latinos, they love making babies,” he called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” and repeated the lie about Haitians eating pets.

Donald Trump and his team, it seems, is striving to lose the election. Despite that, the polls show a tight race between Trump and Harris.

On Harris’ side, she is careful but had to distance herself from Biden telling Latinos “The only garbage I see floating out there is his [Trump] supporters — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.” Harris has yet to comment on former president Bill Clinton‘s “racist Michigan speech” as Sanjana Karanth puts it. Bill Clinton said:

“I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died — I get that, but…” “Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded by civilians, they’ll force you to kill civilians, if you want to defend yourself.”

Harris is very popular, was able to amass great amount of money, got lot of support but somehow the polls — which may be wrong , as often happens — are not favoring her. Who knows, as investigative reporter Dave Lindorff points out, Harris could win if she gets “secret women’s vote” in rural Pennsylvania similar to what happened in Kansas in 2022 regarding the banning of abortion referendum. Julia Roberts encouraged women to exercise their right to choose, within the privacy of the election booth:

This is an election where voters will decide between possible drastic changes that result in fascism, versus, maintaining the unjust pro-war inegalitarian status quo.

However, those who are fed up with the two main lesser and greater evils, there are two other candidates to choose from who are anti-war and pro-common people: Jill Stein of Green Party and Claudia De la Cruz of Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).⁶

ENDNOTES:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by B.R. Gowani.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

If voting could ever really change anything, it’d be illegal.

— Thorne, Land of the Blind (2006)

After months of handwringing and mud-slinging and fear-mongering, the votes have finally been cast and the outcome has been decided: the Deep State has won.

Despite the billions spent to create the illusion of choice culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, when it comes to most of the big issues that keep us in bondage to authoritarian overlords, not much will change.

Despite all of the work that has been done to persuade us to buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the “right” political savior, the day after a new president is sworn in, it will be business as usual for the unelected bureaucracy that actually runs the government.

War will continue. Drone killings will continue. Surveillance will continue. Censorship of anyone who criticizes the government will continue. The government’s efforts to label dissidents as extremists and terrorists will continue. Police shootings will continue. SWAT team raids will continue. Highway robbery meted out by government officials will continue. Corrupt government will continue. Profit-driven prisons will continue. And the militarization of the police will continue.

These problems have persisted—and in many cases flourished—under both Republican and Democratic administrations in recent years.

The outcome of this year’s election changes none of that.

Indeed, take a look at the programs and policies that will not be affected by the 2024 presidential election, and you’ll get a clearer sense of the government’s priorities, which have little to do with representing the taxpayers and everything to do with amassing money, power and control.

The undermining of the Constitution will continue unabated. America’s so-called war on terror, which it has relentlessly pursued since 9/11, has chipped away at our freedoms, unraveled our Constitution and transformed our nation into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act. These laws—which completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional rights of American citizens, re-orienting our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of law, our U.S. Constitution, becomes the map by which we navigate life in the United States—will continue to be enforced.

The government’s war on the American people will continue unabated.  “We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled. Consequently, you no longer have to be poor, black or guilty to be treated like a criminal in America. All that is required is that you belong to the suspect class—that is, the citizenry—of the American police state. As a de facto member of this so-called criminal class, every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent. The oppression and injustice—be it in the form of shootings, surveillance, fines, asset forfeiture, prison terms, roadside searches, and so on—will come to all of us eventually unless we do something to stop it now.

The shadow government— a.k.a. the Deep State, a.k.a. the police state, a.k.a. the military industrial complex, a.k.a. the surveillance state complex—will continue unabated. The corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials will continue to call the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House or controls Congress. By “government,” I’m not referring to 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.

The government’s manipulation of national crises in order to expand its powers will continue unabated. “We the people” have been subjected to an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security. Whatever the so-called threat to the nation, the government has a tendency to capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state. Indeed, the government’s answer to every problem continues to be more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty.

Endless wars that enrich the military industrial complex will continue unabated. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $93 million an hour (that adds up to $920 billion annually). Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 40% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 9 biggest spending nations combined.

Government corruption will continue unabated.  The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.” Americans instinctively understand this. When asked to name the greatest problem facing the nation, Americans of all political stripes ranked the government as the number one concern. In fact, almost three-quarters of Americans surveyed believe the government is corrupt. Our so-called government representatives do not actually represent us, the citizenry. We are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests whose main interest is in perpetuating power and control.

Government tyranny under the reign of an Imperial President will continue unabated. The Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers. In recent years, however, American presidents have anointed themselves with the power to wage war, unilaterally kill Americans, torture prisoners, strip citizens of their rights, arrest and detain citizens indefinitely, carry out warrantless spying on Americans, and erect their own secretive, shadow government. The powers amassed by each past president and inherited by each successive president—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability.

The grim reality we must come to terms with is the fact that the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this state of affairs has become the status quo, no matter which party is in power.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

As the US election unfolds, American territories such as the Northern Marianas, American Samoa, and Guam, along with the broader Pacific region, will be watching the developments.

As the question hangs in the balance of whether the White House remains blue with Kamala Harris or turns red under Donald Trump, academics, New Zealand’s US ambassador, and Guam’s Congressman have weighed in on what the election means for the Pacific.

Massey University’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies senior lecturer Dr Anna Powles said it would no doubt have an impact on small island nations facing climate change and intensified geopolitics, including the rapid expansion of military presence on its territory Guam, following the launch of an interballistic missile by China.

• READ MORE: Voiceless Guam feels ‘injustice’ of US presidential non-vote
• Other US elections reports

Pacific leaders lament the very real security threat of climate-induced natural disasters has been overshadowed by the tug-of-war between China and the US in what academics say is “control and influence” for the contested region.

Dr Powles said it came as “no surprise” that countries such as New Zealand and Australia had increasingly aligned with the US, as the Biden administration had been leveraging strategic partnerships with Australia, New Zealand, and Japan since 2018.

Despite China being New Zealand’s largest trading partner, New Zealand is in the US camp and must pay attention, she said.

“We are not seeing enough in the public domain or discussion by government with the New Zealand public about what this means for New Zealand going forward.”

Pacific leaders welcome US engagement but are concerned about geopolitical rivalry.

Earlier this month, Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Baron Waqa attended the South Pacific Defence Ministers meeting in Auckland.

He said it was important that “peace and stability in the region” was “prioritised”.

Referencing the arms race between China and the US, he said, “The geopolitics occurring in our region is not welcomed by any of us in the Pacific Islands Forum.”

While a Pacific Zone of Peace has been a talking point by Fiji and the PIF leadership to reinforce the region’s “nuclear-free stance”, the US is working with Australia on obtaining nuclear-submarines through the AUKUS security pact.

Dr Powles said the potential for increased tensions “could happen under either president in areas such as Taiwan, East China Sea — irrespective of who is in Washington”.

South Pacific defence ministers told RNZ Pacific the best way to respond to threats of conflict and the potential threat of a nuclear attack in the region is to focus on defence and building stronger ties with its allies.

New Zealand’s Defence Minister said NZ was “very good friends with the United States”, with that friendship looking more friendly under the Biden Administration. But will this strengthening of ties and partnerships continue if Trump becomes President?

US President Joe Biden, center, stands for a group photo with Pacific Islands Forum leaders following the Pacific Islands Forum Summit, at the South Portico of the White House in Washington on September 25, 2023. Photo: Jim Watson

US wants a slice of Pacific
Regardless of who is elected, US Ambassador to New Zealand Tom Udall said history showed the past three presidents “have pushed to re-engage with the Pacific”.

While both Trump and Harris may differ on critical issues for the Pacific such as the climate crisis and multilateralism, both see China as the primary external threat to US interests.

The US has made a concerted effort to step up its engagement with the Pacific in light of Chinese interest, including by reopening its embassies in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Tonga.

On 12 July 2022, the Biden administration showed just how keen it was to have a seat at the table by US Vice-President Kamala Harris dialing in to the Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Fiji at the invitation of the then chair former prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama. The US was the only PIF “dialogue partner” allowed to speak at this Forum.

However, most of the promises made to the Pacific have been “forward-looking” and leaders have told RNZ Pacific they want to see less talk and more real action.

Defence diplomacy has been booming since the 2022 Solomon Islands-China security deal. It tripled the amount of money requested from Congress for economic development and ocean resilience — up to US$60 million a year for 10 years — as well as a return of Peace Corps volunteers to Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu.

Health security was another critical area highlighted in 2024 the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ Declaration.

The Democratic Party’s commitment to the World Health Organisation (WHO) bodes well, in contrast to the previous Trump administration’s withdrawal from the WHO during the covid-19 pandemic.

It continued a long-running programme called ‘The Academy for Women Entrepreneurs’ which gives enterprising women from more than 100 countries with the knowledge, networks and access they need to launch and scale successful businesses.

Guam’s take
Known as the tip of the spear for the United States, Guam is the first strike community under constant threat of a nuclear missile attack.

In September, China launched an intercontinental ballistic test missile in the Pacific for first time in 44 years, landing near French Polynesian waters.

It was seen as a signal of China’s missile capabilities which had the US and South Pacific Defence Ministers on edge and deeply “concerned”.

China’s Defence Ministry said in a statement the launch was part of routine training by the People’s Liberation Army’s Rocket Force, which oversees conventional and nuclear missile operations and was not aimed at any country or target.

The US has invested billions to build a 360-degree missile defence system on Guam with plans for missile tests twice a year over the next decade, as it looks to bolster its weaponry in competition with China.

Despite the arms race and increased military presence and weaponry on Guam, China is known to have fewer missiles than the US.

However, Guamanians are among the four million disenfranchised Americans living in US territories whose vote does not count due to an anomaly in US law.

“While territorial delegates can introduce bills and advocate for their territory in the US Congress, they have no voice on the floor. While Guam is exempted from paying the US federal income tax, many argue that such a waiver does not make up for what the tiny island brings to the table,” according to a BenarNews report.

US Congressman for Guam James Moylan has spent his time making friends and “educating and informing” other states about Guam’s existence in hopes to get increased funding and support for legislative bills.

Moylan said he would prefer a Trump presidency but noted he has “proved he can also work with Democrats”.

Under Trump, Moylan said Guam would have “stronger security”, raising his concerns over the need to stop Chinese fishing boats from coming onto the island.

Moylan also defended the military expansion: “We are not the aggressor. If we put our guard down, we need to be able to show we can maintain our land.”

Moylan defended the US military expansion, which his predecessor, former US Congressman Robert Underwood, was concerned about, saying the rate of expansion had not been seen since World War II.

“We are the closest there is to the Indo-Pacific threat,” Moylan said.

“We need to make sure our pathways, waterways and economy is growing, and we have a strong defence against our aggressors.”

“All likeminded democracies are concerned about the current leadership of China. We are working together…to work on security issues and prosperity issues,” US Ambassador to New Zealand Tom Udall said.

When asked about the military capabilities of the US and Guam, Moylan said: “We are not going to war; we are prepared to protect the homeland.”

Moylan said that discussions for compensation involving nuclear radiation survivors in Guam would happen regardless of who was elected.

The 23-year battle has been spearheaded by atomic veteran Robert Celestial, who is advocating for recognition for Chamorro and Guamanians under the RECA Act.

Celestial said that the Biden administration had thrown their support behind them, but progress was being stalled in Congress, which is predominantly controlled by the Republican party.

But Moylan insisted that the fight for compensation was not over. He said that discussions would continue after the election irrespective of who was in power.

“It’s been tabled. It’s happening. I had a discussion with Speaker Mike Johnson. We are working to pass this through,” he said.

If Trump wins
Dr Powles said a return to Trump’s leadership could derail ongoing efforts to build security architecture in the Pacific.

There are also views Trump would pull back from the Pacific and focus on internal matters, directly impacting his nation.

For Trump, there is no mention of the climate crisis in his platform or Agenda47.

This is in line with the former president’s past actions, such as withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2019, citing “unfair economic burdens” placed on American workers and businesses.

Trump has maintained his position that the climate crisis is “one of the great scams of all time”.

The America First agenda is clear, with “countering China” at the top of the list. Further, “strengthening alliances,” Trump’s version of multilateralism, reads as what allies can do for the US rather than the other way around.

“There are concerns for Donald Trump’s admiration for more dictatorial leaders in North Korea, Russia, China and what that could mean in a time of crisis,” Dr Powles said.

A Trump administration could mean uncertainty for the Pacific, she added.

While Trump was president in 2017, he warned North Korea “not to mess” with the United States.

“North Korea [is] best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met by fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

North Korea responded deriding his warning as a “load of nonsense”.

Although there is growing concern among academics and some Pacific leaders that Trump would bring “fire and fury” to the Indo-Pacific if re-elected, the former president seemed to turn cold at the thought of conflict.

In 2023, Trump remarked that “Guam isn’t America” in response to warning that the US territory could be vulnerable to a North Korean nuclear strike — a move which seemed to distance the US from conflict.

If Harris wins
Dr Powles said that if Harris wins, it was important to move past “announcements” and follow-through on all pledges.

A potential win for Harris could be the fulfilment of the many “promises” made to the Pacific for climate financing, uplifting economies of the Pacific and bolstering defence security, she said.

Pacific leaders want Harris to deliver on the Pacific Partnership Strategy, the outcomes of the two Pacific Islands-US summits in 2022 and 2023, and the many diplomatic visits undertaken during President Biden’s presidency.

The Biden administration recognised Cook Islands and Niue as sovereign and independent states and established diplomatic relationships with them.

Harris has pledged to boost funding to the Green Climate Fund by US$3 billion. She also promised to “tackle the climate crisis with bold action, build a clean energy economy, advance environmental justice, and increase resilience to climate disasters”.

Dr Powles said that delivery needed to be the focus.

“What we need to be focused on is delivery [and that] Pacific Island partners are engaged from the very beginning — from the outset to any programme right through to the final phase of it.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

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.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

Jeff Bezos has finally taken the halo off of his head. It should have never been there in the first place.

Ever since his $250 million purchase of the storied Washington Post in 2013, Bezos has been feted as a savior of the free press (e.g., Slate, 8/6/13; Business Insider, 5/15/16; AdWeek, 11/28/16; New York Times, 2/27/21; Guardian, 6/12/24). The endless fawning was always misplaced. And for me, having grown up watching my parents run the local newspaper, this praise was nauseating.

While Facebook and Google have rightly been called out for destroying the news business, Amazon has been given a comparative pass, even though it may be the worst offender.

Amazon may hoover up a smaller (but growing) portion of ad revenue than Google and Facebook. But its ruthless business practices have helped turn once vibrant Main Streets into ghost towns across the country. Thanks to Amazon, it’s not just ad dollars being lost, but the advertisers themselves—local bookstores, clothing stores, toy stores, etc. And those losses destabilize fragile local economies, and the newspapers that depend on them.

If current trends continue, by the end of the year the US will have lost one-third of its newspapers and nearly two-thirds of its journalism jobs in a span of just two decades, according to a 2023 report by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative. The number of lost reporting jobs, 43,000, is more than enough to fill DC’s baseball stadium.

‘A terrible mistake’

CJR (10/25/24): “Journalists at the Post, in both the news and opinion departments, were stunned” to learn that the paper would not be issuing a presidential endorsement.”

Fortunately, we won’t have to read this Bezos-saves-the-free press drivel any longer, which may be the only good thing to come out of his halo-off moment.

That moment came last Friday when the Post announced that it will no longer be endorsing for president, breaking with its decades-long precedent, and providing a shot in the arm to Trump’s candidacy. The Post’s move came a week after the LA Times, another billionaire-owned paper, did likewise (FAIR.org, 10/25/24).

In short order, Bezos’ top lieutenants at the Post dutifully fell on their swords, claiming it had been their decision. But simultaneously they (or others) leaked to the media that the decision was in fact Bezos’ alone, and they’d even argued against it (New York Times, 10/27/24). In fact, the Post editorial board had been working on its draft endorsement of Kamala Harris for weeks, and for the past week had been awaiting only the sign-off from the top that Bezos never gave (CJR, 10/25/24).

The gold star for trying-to-put-a-happy-face-on-this-hot-mess goes to Will Lewis, the Post CEO and publisher. Bezos tapped the Brit for the paper’s top job last year despite his shady right-wing past. In attempting to defend the indefensible, Lewis (Washington Post, 10/25/24) wrote, “we are returning to our roots.”

No one found this terribly convincing, not even Post columnists, 21 of whom signed onto a statement (10/25/24) calling the non-endorsement “a terrible mistake.” “Disappointing” is how the famed Post duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein put it. But maybe the harshest criticism came from former Post executive editor Marty Baron, who called it “cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty.”

The fallout from Bezos spiking the Harris endorsement has been swift. Since Friday, nearly a third of the Post’s 10-person editorial board has resigned in protest, two Post columnists have departed the paper entirely (with more resignations expected), and 250,000 readers—10% of the Post’s total—have canceled their subscriptions. “It’s a colossal number,” said another former Post executive editor, Marcus Brauchli.

Bezos’ blocking of the Harris endorsement came just 11 days before the election, and on the heels of the Post issuing endorsements for lower-level offices like Senate and House—a practice the Post will continue, even as it discontinues endorsing for president, the one office that can seriously threaten Amazon’s sprawling interests.

Hedging Bezos’ bets

Former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron (CNN, 10/27/24): “Trump rewards his friends and he punishes his perceived political enemies and I think there’s no other explanation for what’s happening right now.”

“This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory,” Post columnist and opinion editor Robert Kagan, who resigned in protest after 25 years at the paper, told CNN (10/27/24):

Trump has threatened to go after Bezos’ business. Bezos runs one of the largest companies in America. They have tremendously intricate relations with federal government. They depend on the federal government.

Recall that Trump as president routinely attacked Amazon and Bezos over the Post’s coverage of him. Trump even went so far as to upend a $10 billion cloud-computing deal between the Pentagon and Amazon Web Services. (Amazon then sued; the contract was ultimately divided among four companies, including Amazon.)

With Trump’s return to office looking as likely as not, Bezos has reason to hedge his bets. That’s especially true considering how dependent on federal largess Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, also is. It currently has a $3.4 billion contract with NASA, and is expected to compete for $5.6 billion in Pentagon contracts over the next five years. Surely this came up when Blue Origin’s CEO met with Trump only hours after the Post announced its non-endorsement (Guardian, 10/27/24). (Blue Origin’s chief competitor is SpaceX, headed by Trump superfan Elon Musk.)

‘Endorsements do nothing’

“Something we are doing is clearly not working,” writes Jeff Bezos (Washington Post, 10/28/24)—and he’s decided that “something” is endorsing presidential candidates.

With all hell breaking loose in the wake of his personal electioneering, Bezos—who can rarely be bothered to explain himself to the free press he supposedly cherishes—had to interrupt his European vacation to pen an op-ed for the Post (10/28/24).

Mustering all the humility you’d expect from the world’s third-richest man, Bezos began not with an apology but an attack—directed at, of all things, the media, including his own paper.

“In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom,” Bezos wrote at the top of his op-ed, headlined “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media.”

The fact that Bezos’ last-minute nixing of the Harris endorsement will only worsen trust in the media went unstated, of course. Thin-skinned billionaires are better at pointing fingers.

Bezos’ op-ed continued:

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None.

And with that, Bezos absolved himself of any role in aiding Trump’s potential return to the Oval Office.

But in the eyes of Trump fundraiser Bill White, it sure looks like Bezos just put his thumb on the scale. “Bezos not endorsing Kamala Harris—I think that’s a $50 million endorsement for Trump,” White told the Post (10/28/24). “Not picking a horse is picking a horse.”

‘No quid pro quo’

Robert Kagan (Daily Beast, 10/26/24): “All Trump has to do is threaten the corporate chiefs who run these organizations with real financial loss, and they will bend the knee.”

The billionaire went on to assure readers that there was “no quid pro quo of any kind” regarding the meeting between the Blue Origin CEO and Trump that took place immediately following the non-endorsement.

Bezos may have penned this line in response to Kagan, the recently departed Post columnist who two days earlier told the Daily Beast (10/26/24) that a quid pro quo is exactly what went down:

Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people…. Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.

While Bezos’ non-endorsement may seem like a last-minute decision, it had “obviously been in the works for some time,” Kagan said, citing Lewis’ hiring as Post CEO and publisher back in January.

Lewis rose to prominence over a decade ago when he helped steer the British wing of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to calmer waters, at a time when Murdoch’s tabloid News of the World was engulfed in a phone-hacking scandal. While Lewis’ actions during this time remain the subject of legal inquiries, Murdoch was quick to promote him, naming Lewis CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal in 2014.

When Bezos tapped Lewis to helm the Post earlier this year, he was aware of Lewis’ shady background (Washington Post, 6/28/24)—and may have even viewed it as a plus.

“[Lewis’] eager solicitude before power could well be why Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos tapped Lewis for the publisher’s job in the first place,” the Nation’s Chris Lehmann (6/21/24) wrote. “[Bezos] may well look at Murdoch’s sleazy antidemocratic empire and think, ‘I want one of those, too.’ If so, his eager quisling Will Lewis is already hitting all the right notes.”

For Kagan, Lewis’ hiring was an early signal of Bezos’ intention to take the Post in a different, right-wing direction. “All the facts” point to Bezos’s desire to remake the Post in the image of the Wall Street Journal, with an “anti-anti-Trump editorial slant,” Kagan told the Daily Beast (10/26/24).

Amazon’s antitrust antipathy

FTC chair Lina Khan (Wired, 9/26/23): “Amazon is now exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform.”

While media are focused on how Bezos bent the knee for Trump, something important has been left out of the story: namely, that it may be President Harris whom Bezos fears most.

A second Trump presidency may put Amazon’s (and Blue Origin’s) current government contracts in danger, but it’s Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, who poses a more serious long-term threat to Amazon, as she seeks to break apart dominant monopolies like the online retail giant, which she’s currently suing.

If Harris wins, there’s a possibility that Khan will stay put, enabling her to continue building on the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust enforcement.

While the FTC’s case against Amazon hasn’t received much attention, it “marks the biggest legal test to date for Amazon’s 30-year-old e-commerce business,” according to the Post (10/1/24). Khan’s lawsuit—which is joined by 17 state attorneys general—alleges that the retailer is “punishing sellers who offer their goods elsewhere at lower prices,” according to Wired (9/26/23)—keeping prices artificially high not only at Amazon, but at thousands of other sites across the web.

In addition to antitrust enforcement, there’s another reason that Bezos (and his ilk) may prefer Trump. “Further compounding the incentive for some executives to stay out of the race is Democrats’ policy agenda,” the Post (10/28/24) reported. “Harris has backed a plan to raise taxes on many of the country’s highest earners.”

For Bezos’ part, he insists (10/28/24), “I do not and will not push my personal interest.” But now that the halo is off, it’s easier to see this is nonsense.

“With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former Blue Origin employee told the Post (10/30/24). “It’s business, period. That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Pete Tucker.

Democracy Now!

This is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I am Amy Goodman, with Juan González:

The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post newspapers are facing mounting backlash after the papers’ publishers announced no presidential endorsements would be made this year. The LA Times is owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, and The Washington Post is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

National Public Radio (NPR) is reporting more than 200,000 people have cancelled their Washington Post subscriptions, and counting.

• READ MORE: Two of the US’s biggest newspapers have refused to endorse a presidential candidate. This is how democracy dies
• Other US presidential elections reports

A number of journalists have also resigned, including the editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times, Mariel Garza, who wrote, “How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger — who we previously endorsed for the U.S. Senate?”

Veteran journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein have also resigned from the L.A. Times editorial board.

At The Washington Post, David Hoffman and Molly Roberts both resigned on Monday from the Post editorial board. Michele Norris also resigned as a Washington Post columnist, and Robert Kagan resigned as editor-at-large.

David Hoffman, who just won a Pulitzer Prize for his series “Annals of Autocracy,” wrote, “I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump. I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.”

David Hoffman joins us now, along with former Los Angeles Times editorials editor Mariel Garza.

David Hoffman, let’s begin with you. Explain why you left The Washington Post editorial board. Oh, and at the same time, congratulations on your Pulitzer Prize.

DAVID HOFFMAN: Thank you very much.

I worked for 12 years writing editorials in which I said over and over again, “We cannot be silent in the face of dictatorship, not anywhere.” And I wrote about dissidents who were imprisoned for speaking out.

And I felt that I couldn’t write another editorial decrying silence if we were going to be silent in the face of Trump’s autocracy. And I feel very, very strongly that the campaign has exposed his intention to be an autocrat.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Hoffman, is there any precedent for the publisher of The Washington Post overruling their own editorial board?

DAVID HOFFMAN: Yeah, there’s lots of precedent. It’s entirely within the right of the publisher and the owner to do this. Previous owners have often told the editorial board what to say, because we are the voice of the institution and its owner. So, there’s nothing wrong with that.

What’s wrong here is the timing. If they had made this decision early in the year and announced, as a principle, they don’t want to issue endorsements, nobody would have even blinked. A lot of papers don’t. People have rightly questioned whether they actually have any impact.

What matters here was, we are right on the doorstep of the most consequential election in our lifetimes. To pull the plug on the endorsement, to go silent against Trump days before the election, that to me was just unconscionable.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Mariel Garza, could you talk about the situation at the LA Times and your reaction when you heard of the owner’s decision?

MARIEL GARZA: Certainly. It was a long conversation over the course of many weeks. We presented our proposal to endorse Kamala Harris. And, of course, there was — to us, there was no question that we would endorse her. We spent nine years talking about the dangers of Trump, called him unfit in 5 million ways, and Kamala Harris is somebody that we know. She’s a California elected official.

We’ve had a lot of conversations with her. We’ve seen her career evolved. We were going to — we were going to endorse her. And there was no indication that we were going to suddenly shift to a neutral position, certainly not within a few weeks or months of the election.

At first, we didn’t get a clear answer — sounds like it’s the same situation that happened at The Washington Post — until we pressed for one. We presented an outline with — these are the points we’re going to make — and an argument for why not only was it important for us, an editorial board whose mission is to speak truth to power, to stand up to tyranny — our readers expect it.

We’re a very liberal paper. There is no — there is no question what the editorial board believes, that Donald Trump should not be president ever.

AMY GOODMAN: Mariel, I wanted to —

MARIEL GARZA: So, it was perplexing. It was mystifying. It was — go ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: Mariel, I wanted to get your response to the daughter of the LA Times owner. On Saturday, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s daughter Nika Soon-Shiong posted a message online suggesting that her father’s decision was linked to Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

Nika wrote, “Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process.

“As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,” she wrote.

Her father, Patrick Soon-Shiong, later disputed her claim, saying that she has no role at the Los Angeles Times. Mariel Garza, your response?

MARIEL GARZA: Look, I really don’t know what to say, because I have — that was — if that was the case, it was never communicated to us. I do not know what goes on in the conversation in the Soon-Shiong household. I know that she is not — she does not participate in deliberations of the editorial board, as far as I know. I’ve never spoken to her.

We all know how she feels about Gaza, because she’s a prolific tweeter. So, I really can’t say. And this is part of the bigger problem, is we were never given a reason for why we were being silent.

If there was a reason — say it was Israel — we could have explained that to readers. Instead, we remain silent. And that’s — I mean, this is not a time in American history where anybody can remain silent or neutral.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Hoffman, this whole issue has been raised by some critics of Jeff Bezos that his company has a lot of business with the US government, and whether that had any impact on Bezos’s decision. I’m wondering your thoughts.

DAVID HOFFMAN: I can’t be inside his mind. His company does have big business, and he’s acknowledged it’s a complicating factor in his ownership. But I can’t really understand why he made this decision, and I don’t think it’s been very well explained. His explanation published today was that he wants sort of more civic quiet, and he thought an endorsement would add to the sense of anxiety and the poisonous atmosphere.

But I disagree with that. I think, like in the LA Times, I think readers have come to expect us to be a voice of reason, and they’ve looked to endorsements at least for some clarity. So, frankly, I also feel that we’re still lacking an explanation.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, you have subtitle, the slogan of The Washington Post, of course, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It’s being mocked all over social media. One person wrote, “Hello Darkness My Old Friend.”

David Hoffman, your response to that? But also, you won the Pulitzer Prize for your series “Annals of Autocracy,” and you talk about digital billionaires, as well, and what this means. How does this fit into your investigations?

DAVID HOFFMAN: You know, I would hope everybody would understand and acknowledge that we’ve done a lot of good for democracy and human rights. You know, I’ve had governments react sharply to a single editorial. When we call them out for imprisoning dissidents, it matters that we are very widely read.

And that’s another reason why I feel this was a big mistake, because we actually were on a path, for decades, of championing democracy and human rights as an institution.

And, you know, I have to tell you, I wrote a book in Russia about oligarchs. I understand how difficult it is when you have a lively and independent group of journalists. And ownership really matters. And, you know, we’re not just another widget company.

This is actually a group of very, very deep-thinking and oftentimes very aggressive people that have a desire to change the world. That’s the kind of journalism that The Washington Post has sponsored and engaged in.

In 2023, we published a series of editorials that took a look deep inside how China, Russia, Burma, you know, other places — how these autocracies function. One of the findings was that many of these dictatorships are using technology to clamp down on dissent, even things as tiny as a single tweet.

Young people, young college students are being thrown in prison in Cuba, in Belarus, in Vietnam. And I documented these to show how this technology actually isn’t becoming a force for freedom, but it’s being turned on its head by dictatorship.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, David Hoffman, Washington Post reporter, stepped down from the Post editorial board when they refused to endorse a presidential candidate; Mariel Garza, LA Times editorials editor who just resigned.

I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

This programme is 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 Pacific Media Watch.

In February 2017, as Donald Trump took office, The Washington Post adopted the first slogan in its 140-year history: “Democracy Dies in Darkness”.

How ironic, then, that it should now be helping to extinguish the flame of American democracy by refusing to endorse a candidate for the forthcoming presidential election.

This decision, and a similar one by the second of America’s big three newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, disgraces journalism, disgraces the papers’ own heritage and represents an abandonment of civic responsibility at a moment when United States faces its most consequential presidential election since the Civil War.

• READ MORE: Furor over Washington Post’s decision to not endorse presidential candidate: ‘stab in the back’, ‘dying in darkness’
• LA Times owner’s decision not to endorse in presidential race sparks resignations, questions

At stake is whether the United States remains a functioning democracy or descends into a corrupt plutocracy led by a convicted criminal who has already incited violence to overturn a presidential election and has shown contempt for the conventions on which democracy rests.

Everyone should cancel their Washington Post subscription after Bezos copped out on a presidential endorsement. It is shameful how far a once great newspaper has fallen. I cancelled today.

— Allan Lichtman (@AllanLichtman) October 26, 2024

Why did they do it?
Why would two of the Western world’s finest newspapers take such a recklessly irresponsible decision?

It cannot be on the basis of any rational assessment of the respective fitness for office of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

It also cannot be on the basis of their own reporting and analysis of the candidates, where the lies and threats issued by Trump have been fearlessly recorded. In this context, the decision to not endorse a candidate is a betrayal of their own editorial staff. The Post’s editor-at-large, Robert Kagan, resigned in protest at the paper’s decision not to endorse Harris.

This leaves, in my view, a combination of cowardice and greed as the only feasible explanation. Both newspapers are owned by billionaire American businessmen: The Post by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, and the LA Times by Patrick Soon-Shiong, who made his billions through biotechnology.

Bezos bought The Post in 2013 through his private investment company Nash Holdings, and Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times in 2018 through his investment firm Nant Capital. Both run the personal risk of suffering financially should a Trump presidency turn out to be hostile towards them.

During the election campaign, Trump has made many threats of retaliation against those in the media who oppose him. He has indicated that if he regains the White House, he will exact vengeance on news outlets that anger him, toss reporters in jail and strip major television networks of their broadcast licenses as retribution for coverage he doesn’t like.

Trump threatens to jail political opponents.  Video: CBS News

Logic would suggest that in the face of these threats, the media would do all in their power to oppose a Trump presidency, if not out of respect for democracy and free speech then at least in the interests of self-preservation. But fear and greed are among the most powerful of human impulses.

The purchase of these two giants of the American press by wealthy businessmen is a consequence of the financial pressures exerted on the professional mass media by the internet and social media.

Bezos was welcomed with open arms by the Graham family, which had owned The Post for four generations. But the paper faced unsustainable financial losses arising from the loss of advertising to the internet.

At first he was seen not just by the Grahams but by the executive editor, Marty Baron, as a saviour. He injected large sums of money into the paper, enabling it to regain much of the prestige and journalistic capacity it had lost.

Baron, in his book Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post, was full of praise for Bezos’s financial commitment to the paper, and for his courage in the face of Trumpian hostility. During Trump’s presidency, the paper kept a log of his lies, tallying them up at 30,573 over the four years.

Against this history, the paper’s abdication of its responsibilities now is explicable only by reference to a loss of heart by Bezos.

At the LA Times, the ownership of the Otis-Chandler families also spanned four generations, but the impact of the internet took a savage toll there as well. Between 2000 and 2018 its ownership passed through three hands, ending up with Soon-Shiong.

Both newspapers reached the zenith of their journalistic accomplishments during the last three decades of the 20th century, winning Pulitzer Prices and, in the case of The Post, becoming globally famous for its coverage of the Watergate scandal.

This, in the days when American democracy was functioning according to convention, led to the resignation of Richard Nixon as president.

The two reporters responsible for this coverage, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, issued a statement about the decision to not endorse a candidate:

Statement on Washington Post’s refusal to endorse presidential candidate. pic.twitter.com/r8jrMPW5GR

— Carl Bernstein (@carlbernstein) October 26, 2024

Marty Baron, who was a ferociously tough editor, posted on X: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.”

Now, of the big three, only The New York Times is prepared to endorse a candidate for next month’s election. It has endorsed Harris, saying of Trump: “It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States.”

Why does it matter?
It matters because in democracies the media are the means by which voters learn not just about facts but about the informed opinion of those who, by virtue of access and close acquaintance, are well placed to make assessments of candidates between whom those voters are to choose. It is a core function of the media in democratic societies.

Their failure is symptomatic of the malaise into which American democracy has sunk.

In 2018, two professors of government at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, published a book, How Democracies Die. It was both reflective and prophetic. Noting that the United States was now more polarised than at any time since the Civil War, they wrote:

America is no longer a democratic model. A country whose president attacks the press, threatens to lock up his rival, and declares he might not accept the election results cannot credibly defend democracy. Both potential and existing autocrats are likely to be emboldened with Trump in the White House.

Symbolically, that The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times should have gone dark at this moment is reminiscent of the remark made in 1914 by Britain’s foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey:

The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

Dr Denis Muller is senior research fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

 A widely-reported mainstream estimate is of about 40,000 Gazans killed since 7 October 2023 (1,139 Israelis killed) in the Jewish Israeli-imposed Gaza Genocide or 50,000 including 10,000 dead under rubble. Thus Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (6 October 2024): “Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army, including around 42,000 recorded by the Gaza Ministry of Health, the majority being women and children”.

However, these estimates do not consider indirect deaths from Jewish Israeli-imposed deprivation through war criminal siege involving deprivation of life-sustaining water, food, shelter, sanitation, medicine  and medical care in gross violation of Articles  55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that unequivocally state that an Occupier must provide its conquered Subjects with life-sustaining food and medical services “to the fullest extent of the means available to  it”.

 I have been researching avoidable mortality from deprivation for 3 decades (see my huge book Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950). Thus, for example,  I estimated 9.5 million deaths from violence and deprivation in the Iraq and Afghan wars as compared to the 4.7 million estimate by the “Cost of War” project of a huge team at prestigious Brown University.

 Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee  and  Salim Yusuf in the leading medical journal The Lancet (10 July 2024): “Collecting data is becoming increasingly difficult for the Gaza Health Ministry due to the destruction of much of the infrastructure… Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death 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”.

 Professor Devi Sridhar (chair, global public health, University of Edinburgh) taking deaths from deprivation (indirect deaths) into account (5 September 2024): “For several decades, methods have been developed to build up datasets in situations with poor or damaged health and monitoring systems…Using the method, the total deaths since the conflict began would be estimated at about 335,500 in total”.

Because Global South under-5 year old infant deaths are 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation this 335,500 deaths in 11 months can be translated (based on reported child, adult female and adult male proportions of the 50,000 violent deaths) to deaths from violence and imposed deprivation in the first year of the Gaza Massacre totalling about 366,000, including 267,000 children, 31,000 women and 71,000 men.

 This horrific and utterly unforgivable killing in the US- and US Alliance-complicit  Gaza Massacre and Gaza Genocide should be the key issue in all Western elections but is not. Indeed the horrific estimated numbers (e.g.  335,500 dead) are overwhelmingly not reported by racist, mendacious and genocide-ignoring US and Western Mainstream journalist, editor, politician, academic and commentariat  presstitutes. I have ranked the 5 US presidential candidates for decency as follows:

#1.  Dr Jill Stein (the Greens candidate)  tops the list of candidates because she ticks all boxes – an end to the killing, genocide, occupation and human rights denial. (In addition she wants strong action on climate  change, and war and  no doubt is opposed to nuclear weapons.)

#2.  Dr Cornell West (Independent) comes equal first with Dr Stein on Palestinian human rights and ending  war and occupation, but Dr Stein as a Green is in addition more strongly active on climate change.

#3.  Chase Oliver (Libertarian candidate) comes third because he opposes war and thus would want the violence in Gaza and Lebanon to end. However he supports the Mainstream American position by support (albeit non-military) for  Apartheid Israel and hence is seriously morally compromised over Palestinian human rights. Indeed he “would allow private parties, including defense contractors, to voluntarily contribute funds and sell weapons to our friends without fear of violating any Federal laws”. Those supporting Apartheid Israel are supporting the vile crime of Apartheid and are thus severely morally compromised in a one-person- one-vote democracy like America.

#4.  Donald Trump (Republican) is awful in fervently supporting Apartheid Israel and hence the vile crime of Apartheid. He enthusiastically supports the Apartheid Israeli war on Gaza but thinks that the devastation and killing is a bad look. A serious flaw is his appalling and continuing record of blatant lying (over 30,000 lies during the  4 years of his administration) – this seriously questions his judgement, his amenability to expert scientific opinion, and hence his suitability for high office. On the other hand his lying could be regarded as political gamesmanship , noting that his opponent Kamala Harris also lies but in a less obvious and hence more plausible and more dangerous fashion. 2 big pluses of Trump over Kamala Harris are (1)  he is against  wars, talks to his international enemies and will stop the Ukraine War to end the horrific killing, and (2) he is not actually involved in the Gaza Massacre.

#5.  Kamala Harris (Democrat) must be ranked last if you believe in the sanctity of life of born children. Child-killing geriatric Genocide Joe and Kid-Killing Kamala (KKK) Harris are still supplying the funding, the bombs and the weapons that in the first year alone have killed 366,000 Gazans including 267,000 children, 31,000 women and 71,000 men. The Bible states “An eye for eye, tooth for tooth” but the bombs-supplying Biden-Harris Administration has killed 366,000 Gazans in the first year alone in Jewish Israeli reprisals for the deaths of 1, 139 Israelis on 7 October 2023 (97.5 % adults and hence mostly  present or former Occupier IDF soldiers, and many killed in the IDF response under the IDF “Hannibal Directive”). Indeed  Jesus stated: “And whosoever shall offend ONE of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea”.

• For details and documentation see Gideon Polya, “335,500 Gaza Dead Estimate: Voting For Kid-Killing Kamala (KKK) Harris Means Complicity in Genocide,” Countercurrents.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gideon Polya.

1. Video content. One of said old comrades asserts that disseminating said video will enable people “to be informed”.  In fact, it is a disinformation propaganda piece repeating the hypocritical Harris-Walz campaign narrative.  It focuses exclusive on Trump and his backers; and it omits all mention of the actual record of the Biden-Harris Presidency and of the Harris-Walz campaign.  Misleading arguments and deceitful omissions therein include the following.

(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 1^st 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.

2. Fascist repression? The video predicts that a 2nd Trump presidency would be a thoroughly repressive autocracy.  It quotes extensively from fascistic Trump advisors (Bannon, Flynn, Thiel, Leo) who make statements suggestive of seeking to undo “American representative democracy” in the interests of ultra-reactionary corporate oligarchs and bigoted “Christian” nationalist theocrats.  Certainly, a President Trump would like to be able to exercise CEO-type autocratic power.  The video assumes that he would be able to actually do so.  Problems with this scenario.

(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.

3. 3. Choice. The Harris-Walz campaign had 2 choices: (1) center-right alliance with neocon imperialists (Dick and Liz Cheney, John Bolton, et al) and genocide-backing Zionists; or (2) center-left alliance aligning with the social justice advocates for human rights in Palestine, Lebanon, Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, et cetera.  It chose the former.  Although a Harris Presidency would be a little less oppressive domestically then one led by Trump, there is no reason to believe it would be any less oppressive and murderous in its foreign policy.

4. 4. “Antifascist united front”! In the US, many avowed “socialists” (claiming to be anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-genocide, pro-social-justice, et cetera) are advocating for a “broad anti-fascist united front” in support of the Harris-Walz-Cheney-Bolton campaign in order to block Trump from another 4 years in the Oval Office.  There are 2 possible evaluations of that policy: (1) it is a surrender to genocidal imperialism; or (2) it is a necessary compromise to prevent systemic repression of our struggles for social justice.  Problems with said “united front”.

(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.

4. 4. 5. Strategy. What is a correct strategy and tactics?  Consider the following!

(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”.

4. 4. 5. Conclusions. The aforementioned video is simply devoid of any critique of Biden’s unjust policies or of the Democrat campaign’s endorsement thereof.  My avowedly Marxist and anti-imperialist old comrades, using said video to win votes for said campaign, are, in effect, conducting a whitewash in pursuit of a win for the Harris-Walz-Cheney-Bolton center-right ticket.  In portraying the perfidious centrist Democrats as saviors of progress and “democracy”, they neglect, even undermine, efforts to build the revolutionary social justice movement.

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.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Charles Pierce.

1. Video content. One of said old comrades asserts that disseminating said video will enable people “to be informed”.  In fact, it is a disinformation propaganda piece repeating the hypocritical Harris-Walz campaign narrative.  It focuses exclusive on Trump and his backers; and it omits all mention of the actual record of the Biden-Harris Presidency and of the Harris-Walz campaign.  Misleading arguments and deceitful omissions therein include the following.

(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 1^st 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.

2. Fascist repression? The video predicts that a 2nd Trump presidency would be a thoroughly repressive autocracy.  It quotes extensively from fascistic Trump advisors (Bannon, Flynn, Thiel, Leo) who make statements suggestive of seeking to undo “American representative democracy” in the interests of ultra-reactionary corporate oligarchs and bigoted “Christian” nationalist theocrats.  Certainly, a President Trump would like to be able to exercise CEO-type autocratic power.  The video assumes that he would be able to actually do so.  Problems with this scenario.

(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.

3. 3. Choice. The Harris-Walz campaign had 2 choices: (1) center-right alliance with neocon imperialists (Dick and Liz Cheney, John Bolton, et al) and genocide-backing Zionists; or (2) center-left alliance aligning with the social justice advocates for human rights in Palestine, Lebanon, Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, et cetera.  It chose the former.  Although a Harris Presidency would be a little less oppressive domestically then one led by Trump, there is no reason to believe it would be any less oppressive and murderous in its foreign policy.

4. 4. “Antifascist united front”! In the US, many avowed “socialists” (claiming to be anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-genocide, pro-social-justice, et cetera) are advocating for a “broad anti-fascist united front” in support of the Harris-Walz-Cheney-Bolton campaign in order to block Trump from another 4 years in the Oval Office.  There are 2 possible evaluations of that policy: (1) it is a surrender to genocidal imperialism; or (2) it is a necessary compromise to prevent systemic repression of our struggles for social justice.  Problems with said “united front”.

(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.

4. 4. 5. Strategy. What is a correct strategy and tactics?  Consider the following!

(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”.

4. 4. 5. Conclusions. The aforementioned video is simply devoid of any critique of Biden’s unjust policies or of the Democrat campaign’s endorsement thereof.  My avowedly Marxist and anti-imperialist old comrades, using said video to win votes for said campaign, are, in effect, conducting a whitewash in pursuit of a win for the Harris-Walz-Cheney-Bolton center-right ticket.  In portraying the perfidious centrist Democrats as saviors of progress and “democracy”, they neglect, even undermine, efforts to build the revolutionary social justice movement.

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.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Charles Pierce.

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 content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Pauline Easton.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable…

— H.L. Mencken, “Le Contrat Social” in Prejudices: Third Series (1922)

If the three-ring circus that is the looming presidential election proves anything, it is that the Deep State’s plot to destabilize the nation is working.

The danger is real.

Caught up in the heavily dramatized electoral showdown between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Americans have become oblivious to the multitude of ways in which the government is goosestepping all over our freedoms on a daily basis.

Especially alarming is the extent to which those on both sides are allowing themselves to be gaslighted by both Trump and Harris about critical issues of the day, selectively choosing to hear only what they want to hear when it casts the opposition in a negative light.

This is true whether you’re talking about immigration and border control, health care, national security, the nation’s endless wars, protections for free speech, or the militarization of the U.S. government.

For starters, there’s the free speech double standard, what my good friend Nat Hentoff used to refer to as the “free speech for me but not for thee” phenomenon in which the First Amendment’s protections only apply to those with whom we might agree.

Despite her claims to being a champion for the rule of law, which in our case is the U.S. Constitution, Harris isn’t averse to policing so-called “hate” speech. In this, Harris is not unlike those on both the Right and the Left who continue to express a distaste for unregulated, free speech online, especially when it comes to speech with which they might disagree.

Then there’s Trump, never a fan of free speech protections for his critics, who has been particularly vocal about his desire to see the military vanquish “radical left lunatics,” which he has dubbed “the enemy from within.”

If it were only about muzzling free speech activities, that would be concerning enough.

But Trump’s enthusiasm for using the military to target domestic enemies of the state should send off warning bells, especially coinciding as it does with the Department of Defense’s recent re-issuance of Directive 5240.01, which empowers the military to assist law enforcement “in situations where a confrontation between civilian law enforcement and civilian individuals or groups is reasonably anticipated.”

This is what martial law looks like—a government of force that relies on the military to enforce its authority—and it’s exactly what America’s founders feared, which is why they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

Responding to concerns that the military would be used for domestic policing, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, which makes it a crime for the government to use the military to carry out arrests, searches, seizure of evidence and other activities normally handled by a civilian police force.

The increasing militarization of the police, the use of sophisticated weaponry against Americans and the government’s increasing tendency to employ military personnel domestically have all but eviscerated historic prohibitions such as the Posse Comitatus Act.

Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

Unfortunately, most Americans seem relatively untroubled by the fact that our constitutional republic is being transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

The seeds of chaos that have been sown in recent years are all part of the Deep State’s plans to usher in martial law.

Observe for yourself what has been happening right before our eyes.

Domestic terrorism fueled by government entrapment schemes. Civil unrest stoked to dangerous levels by polarizing political rhetoric. A growing intolerance for dissent that challenges the government’s power grabs. Police brutality tacitly encouraged by the executive branch, conveniently overlooked by the legislatures, and granted qualified immunity by the courts. A weakening economy exacerbated by government schemes that favor none but a select few. Heightened foreign tensions and blowback due to the military industrial complex’s profit-driven quest to police and occupy the globe.

This is no conspiracy theory.

There’s trouble brewing, and the government is masterminding a response using the military.

Just take a look at “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command.

The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.

Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.

The training video anticipates that all hell will break loose by 2030, but the future is here ahead of schedule.

We’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually every front.

By waging endless wars abroad, by bringing the instruments of war home, by transforming police into extensions of the military, by turning a free society into a suspect society, by treating American citizens like enemy combatants, by discouraging and criminalizing a free exchange of ideas, by making violence its calling card through SWAT team raids and militarized police, by fomenting division and strife among the citizenry, by acclimating the citizenry to the sights and sounds of war, and by generally making peaceful revolution all but impossible, the government has engineered an environment in which domestic violence is becoming almost inevitable.

The danger signs are screaming out a message

The government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power.

According to the Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. government is grooming its armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems.

What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

And then comes the kicker.

Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

Drain the swamps.

Surely, we’ve heard that phrase before?

Ah yes.

Emblazoned on t-shirts and signs, shouted at rallies, and used as a rallying cry among Trump supporters, “drain the swamp” became one of Donald Trump’s most-used campaign slogans.

Now the government has adopted its own plans for swamp-draining, only it wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of “noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.”

And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting?

They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.”

They are “threats.”

They are the “enemy.”

They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).

In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.

In the future imagined by the Pentagon, any walls and prisons that are built will be used to protect the societal elite—the haves—from the have-nots.

If you haven’t figured it out already, we the people are the have-nots.

Suddenly it all begins to make sense.

The events of recent years: the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers.

The government is systematically locking down the nation and shifting us into martial law.

This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls.

Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that there is nothing they can do to alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

Before long, no one will even notice the floundering economy, the blowback arising from military occupations abroad, the police shootings, the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure and all of the other mounting concerns.

It’s happening already.

The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.

Few seem to care about the government’s endless wars abroad that leave communities shattered, families devastated and our national security at greater risk of blowback.

The Deep State’s tactics are working.

We’ve allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, Jade Helm military drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and  Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.

Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned about the government’s nefarious schemes to lock down the nation.

Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

All of this has taken place right under our noses, funded with our taxpayer dollars and carried out in broad daylight without so much as a general outcry from the citizenry.

And then you have the government’s Machiavellian schemes for unleashing all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace, then demanding additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threats.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.

The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

Just think about it for a minute: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars.

Almost every national security threat that the government has claimed greater powers in order to fight—all the while undermining the liberties of the American citizenry—has been manufactured in one way or another by the government.

Did I say Machiavellian? This is downright evil.

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

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.

I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

Be warned: in the future envisioned by the government, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will be enemies of the state.

For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

What the government failed to explain was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own making, and that “we the people” would become enemy #1.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re already enemies of the state.

It’s time to wake up and stop being deceived by Deep State propaganda.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

The majority of Cubans support Castro…every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba…to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.

— Lester D. Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, 1960

Despite draconian coercive measures by the US – overwhelmingly condemned every year by the UN General Assembly, with the next vote slated for October 29-30 – the Cuban Revolution has had extraordinary successes. This small, impoverished, formerly colonized island nation has achieved levels of education, medical services, and performance in many other fields, including sports, that rival the first world, through the application of socialist principles.

Cuba has rightly become a model of internationalism and an exemplar of socialism. As a consequence, every US administration for over six decades has targeted this “threat of a good example.” Back in its early days, the Cuban Revolution was bolstered by socialist solidarity, particularly from the Soviet Union.

The contemporary geopolitical situation is very different. Most notably the socialist bloc is defunct. Meanwhile, Cuba continues to be confronted by a still hegemonic US. In turn, the Yankee empire is now challenged by the hope of an emergent multipolar order. Cuba has expressed interest in joining the BRICS trade alliance of emerging economies and will attend their meeting in Russia, October 22-24.

Successes turned into liabilities

Today, Cuba is confronting perhaps its greatest challenge. The ever intensified US blockade is designed to perversely turn the successes of the revolution into liabilities.

For example, the revolution achieved one hundred percent literacy, created farming collectives and cooperatives, and mechanized cultivation, thus freeing the campesinos from the drudgery of peasant subsistence agriculture.

But now, most tractors are idle, in need of scarce fuel and embargoed spare parts. Agricultural production has subsequently contracted. In May, I was on a bus that traveled the length of the island. Mile upon mile of once productive agricultural fields lay fallow.

Historical yields of key crops are down nearly 40% due to lack of fertilizers and pesticides, according to a Cuban government statement. The daily bread ration has been slashed, Reuters reports.

In order to feed the nation, the state has had to use precious hard currency to import food; currency which otherwise could be used to repair a crumbling infrastructure. Broken pipes have caused widespread shortages of drinking water.

Under siege, some 10% percent of the population, over a million Cubans, have left between 2022 and 2023. This has, in turn, led to a drain of skilled labor and a decrease in productivity, contributing to a vicious cycle driving out-migration.

Le Monde diplomatique cautions: “Cuba is facing a moment that is extraordinarily precarious. While numerous factors have led to this…US sanctions have, at every juncture, triggered or worsened every aspect of the current crisis.”

The Obama engagement

 Of the some 40 sovereign states sanctioned and slated for regime-change by Washington, Cuba is somewhat unique. Until recently, the island did not have the domestic social classes from which a counter-revolutionary base could be recruited.

In Cuba, most bourgeoisie under the Batista dictatorship left the country shortly after the revolution. The large US corporations that they had operated were expropriated. Similarly, when the government nationalized many small businesses in the 1960s, others fled to US shores.

By 2014, then-US President Obama lamented that Washington’s Cuba policy had “failed to advance our interests.” Obama’s new strategy was to engage Cuba in the hope of fostering a counter-revolutionary class opposition.

Obama reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba after a hiatus dating to 1961. Travel and some trade restrictions were lifted. And more remittances from relatives living in the US could be sent to Cuba.

In his famous March 2016 speech in Havana, Obama proclaimed to rousing applause: “I’ve called on our Congress to lift the embargo.” This was an outright lie. The US president had only remarked that the so-called embargo (really a blockade, because the US enforces it on third countries) was “outdated.”

Obama lauded the cuentapropistas, small entrepreneurs in Cuba, and pledged to help promote that stratum. He promised a new US policy focus of encouraging small businesses in Cuba. “There’s no limitation from the United States on the ability of Cuba to take these steps” to create what in effect would be a potentially counter-revolutionary class, Obama promised.

Obama warned the Cubans, “over time, the youth will lose hope” if prosperity were not achieved by creating a new small business class.

While normalizing relations with Cuba, Obama took a more adversarial stance toward Venezuela. He declared the oil-rich South American nation an “unusual and extraordinary threat” and imposed “targeted sanctions” on March 2015. The successes of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution in promoting regional integration were challenging US influence in Latin America, prompting Washington to adopt a “dual-track diplomacy” of engagement with Cuba and containment with Venezuela.

Obama spoke of the “failed” US policy on Cuba, which had not achieved “its intended goals.” Often left unsaid was that the “goal” has been to reverse the Cuban revolution. Obama’s intent was not to terminate the US regime-change policy, but to achieve it more effectively.

His engagement tactic should not be confused for accord. Obama still championed the three belligerent core elements of the US policy: a punishing blockade, occupation of the port of Guantanamo, and covert actions to undermine and destabilize Cuba.

Trump undoes and outdoes Obama

 Donald Trump assumed office at a time when the leftist Pink Tide was ebbing. Taking advantage of the changed geopolitical context, the new president intensified Obama’s offensive against Cuba’s closest regional supporter Venezuela, while reversing his predecessor’s engagement with Havana. His “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela devastated their oil sector, thereby reducing Cuba’s petroleum subsidies from its ally.

Trump enacted 243 coercive measures against Cuba. He ended individual “people-to-people” educational travel, banned US business with military-linked Cuban entities, and imposed caps on remittances. In the closing days of his administration, he relisted Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, which further cut the island off from international finance.

Biden continues and extends Trump’s policies

 Joe Biden, while campaigning for the presidency, played to liberal sentiment with vague inferences that he would restore a policy of engagement and undo Trump’s sanctions on Cuba.

By the time Biden assumed the US presidency, Cuba had been heavily impacted by the Covid pandemic. Temporary lockdowns reduced domestic productivity. Travel restrictions dried up tourist dollars, a major source of foreign currency.

Once in office and Cuba ever more vulnerable, Biden continued and extended Trump’s policies, including retaining it on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.

At the height of the Covid pandemic, Belly of the Beast reported how scarcities in Cuba fueled anti-government demonstrations on July 11, 2021. Eleven days later, Biden imposed yet more sanctions to further exacerbate the scarcities.

As an article in the LA Progressive explained, “Cuba’s humanitarian crisis – fueled by the sanctions maintained by Biden – seems to have only encouraged his administration to keep tightening the screws,” concluding “his policy remains largely indistinguishable from that of Trump.”

Biden, however, continued the Obama policy of empowering the Cuban private sector. He allowed more remittances, disproportionately benefiting Cubans with relatives in the US (who tend to be better off financially). He also facilitated international fund transfers involving private Cuban businesses. Amendments to the Cuban Assets Control Regulations enhanced internet access to encourage development of private telecommunications infrastructures for “independent entrepreneurs.”

 What about Democratic Party presidential hopeful Kamala Harris?

“When evaluating the impact of a possible Kamala Harris electoral victory on the United States’ Cuba policy,” On Cuba News admits, “the first thing that should be recognized is the lack of evidence or antecedents to form a well-founded forecast.” Likewise, the Miami Herald finds Harris’s current Latin American policies a mystery with “few clues and a lot of uncertainty.”

Going back to when she was on the vice-presidential campaign trail in 2020, Harris commented about the possibility of easing the blockade on what she called the “dictatorship.” She said that won’t happen anytime soon and would have to be predicated on a new Washington-approved government in Cuba.

Alternative for Cuba

If Cubans want to see what an alternative future might be like under Yankee beneficence, they need only look 48 miles to the east at the deliberately made to fail state of Haiti.

In the US, the National Network on Cuba, ACERE, and Pastors for Peace are among the organizations working to end the blockade and get Cuba off the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.

As the US Peace Council admonished: “No matter how heroic a people may be, socialism must provide for their material needs. The US blockade of Cuba is designed precisely to thwart that and to discredit socialism in Cuba and anywhere else where oppressed people try to better their lot…The intensified US interference in Cuba is a wakeup call for greater efforts at solidarity.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

With less than a month until Election Day, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, sat down for an interview with Bill Whitaker on CBS‘s 60 Minutes (10/7/24). (Donald Trump backed out of a similar interview.)

Aside from one televised debate (ABC, 9/10/24), both Harris and Trump have given corporate news outlets remarkably few opportunities to press them on important issues. While Whitaker didn’t offer Harris many softball questions—and included some sharp interrogation on the Middle East—his focus frequently started from right-wing talking points and assumptions, particularly over immigration and economic policy.

FAIR counted 29 questions, with 24 of them going to Harris. Those questions began with foreign policy, which also accounted for the most policy-related questions (7). Whitaker also asked her five questions about the economy, four about immigration, and one more generally about her changed positions on immigration, fracking and healthcare. Seven of Whitaker’s questions to Harris were unrelated to policies or governing; of the five questions to Walz, the only vaguely policy-oriented one asked him to respond to the charge that he was “dangerously liberal.”

‘How are you going to pay?’

A Pew survey (9/9/24) shows little correlation between what voters care about and what 60 Minutes (10/7/24) asked Kamala Harris about.

Economic issues are a top priority for many voters. But rather than ask Harris about whether and how her plan might help people economically, or formulate questions to help voters understand the differences between Harris’s and Trump’s plans, Whitaker focused on two long-standing media obsessions: the deficit and bipartisanship (or lack thereof).

Whitaker first asked Harris: “Groceries are 25% higher, and people are blaming you and Joe Biden for that. Are they wrong?” It’s not clear that people primarily blame the administration for inflation, actually; a Financial Times/Michigan Ross poll in March found that 63% of respondents blamed higher prices on “large corporations taking advantage of inflation,” while 38% blamed Democratic policies (CNBC, 3/12/24).

Whitaker went on to list some of Harris’s more progressive economic proposals: “expand the child tax credit…give tax breaks to first-time homebuyers…and people starting small businesses.”

These are all generally politically popular, but Whitaker framed his question about them not in terms of the impact on voters, but the impact on the federal deficit, citing a deficit hawk think tank:

But it is estimated by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that your economic plan would add $3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. How are you going to pay for that?

There is a very popular assumption in corporate media that federal deficits are of critical importance—that is, when Democrats are proposing to provide aid and public services to people. When Republicans propose massive tax breaks for the wealthy and for corporations, the same media tend to forget their deficit obsession (FAIR.org, 1/25/21).

It is worth noting—since Whitaker did not—that the CRFB found that Trump’s plan, which follows that Republican playbook, would increase the debt by $7.5 trillion. One might also bear in mind that US GDP is projected to be more than $380 trillion over the next decade.

Dissatisfied with Harris’s rather oblique answer, Whitaker insisted: “But pardon me, Madam Vice President, the question was how are you going to pay for it?” When Harris responded that she intended to “make sure that the richest among us who can afford it pay their fair share of taxes,” Whitaker scoffed: “We’re dealing with the real world here. How are you going to get this through Congress?”

After Harris argued that congressmembers “know exactly what I’m talking about, ’cause their constituents know exactly what I’m talking about,” Whitaker shot back, “And Congress has shown no inclination to move in your direction.”

Sure, journalists shouldn’t let politicians make pie-in-the-sky promises, but it’s true that Harris’s proposals are supported by majorities of the public. Whitaker did viewers—and democracy—no favors by focusing his skepticism not on a corrupt system that benefits the wealthy, but on Harris’s critique of that system.

‘A historic flood’

Serious efforts to count the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States show little sign of the “flood” touted by 60 Minutes (Pew, 7/22/24).

Whitaker’s framing was even more right-wing on immigration. His first question,  framed by a voiceover noting that “Republicans are convinced immigration is the vice president’s Achilles’ heel”:

You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers, and that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?

Whitaker is referring to Biden’s tightening restrictions so that refugees cannot be granted asylum when US officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed. It’s certainly valid to question the new policies; the ACLU (6/12/24) has argued they are unconstitutional, for instance.

But Whitaker clearly wasn’t interested in constitutionality or human rights. His questioning started from the presumption that immigration is a problem, and used the dehumanizing language that is all too common in corporate media reporting on immigrants (FAIR.org, 8/23/23):

Whitaker: But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?

Harris: It’s a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.

Whitaker: What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?

Harris: I think—the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, OK? But the—

Whitaker: But the numbers did quadruple under your watch.

As others have pointed out, using flood metaphors paints immigrants as “natural disasters who should be dealt with in an inhumane fashion” (Critical Discourse Studies, 1/31/17).

But Whitaker is also using a right-wing talking point that’s entirely misleading. Border “encounters” increased sharply under Biden, but these encounters, as we have explained before (FAIR.org, 3/29/24),

are not a tally of how many people were able to enter the country without authorization; it’s a count of how many times people were stopped at the border by CBP agents. Many of these people had every right to seek entry, and a great number were turned away. Some of them were stopped more than once, and therefore were counted multiple times.

In fact, only roughly a third were actually released into the country (Factcheck.org, 2/27/24).

Whitaker used these misleading figures to paint undocumented immigration as a crisis, which has been a media theme since the beginning of the Biden administration (FAIR.org, 5/24/21). In fact, the percentage of the US population that is unauthorized has risen only slightly—from 3.2% in 2019 to 3.3% in 2022, the latest year available—which is down from a peak of 4.0% in 2007 (Pew, 7/22/24).

‘Does the US have no sway?’

Internal controversy over Tony Dokoupil’s  confrontational interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates (CBS Mornings, 9/30/24) may have given Bill Whitaker an opening to challenge Harris on whether she was too supportive of Israel.

Whitaker’s first questions to Harris, about the Middle East, represented a shift in tone from ABC‘s questioning at the September debate—where moderator David Muir asked Harris to respond to Trump’s charge that “you hate Israel.” Whitaker started his interview by pressing Harris about the United States’ continued support of Israel despite its recent escalations:

The events of the past few weeks have pushed us into the brink, if not into, an all-out regional war into the Middle East. What can Hthe US do at this point to prevent this from spinning out of control?

Harris repeated the Biden administration (and, frequently, media) line that Israel has a right to defend itself, while noting that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” and that “this war has to end.” Whitaker pushed back, pointing out that the United States is an active supporter of Israel’s military and, thus, military actions:

But we supply Israel with billions of dollars of military aid, and yet Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu seems to be charting his own course. The Biden/Harris administration has pressed him to agree to a ceasefire, he has resisted. You urged him not to go into Lebanon, he went in anyway. Does the US have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?

Whitaker continued with two more brief questions about the relationship with Netanyahu. It’s possible that his line of questioning was influenced by the controversy  within his network over CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil’s interview (9/30/24) with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, which pushed a pro-Israel line hard enough to prompt charges of unprofessionalism (FAIR.org, 10/4/24; Zeteo, 10/9/24).

The three other foreign policy questions concerned US support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Two of the three asked about ending the war: “What does success look like in ending the war in Ukraine?” and “Would you meet with President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a solution to the war in Ukraine?” The third asked whether Harris would “support the effort to expand NATO to include Ukraine.”

In contrast to the Middle East line of questioning, Whitaker did not push back against any of Harris’s answers, which expressed support for “Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s unprovoked aggression,” and to “have a say” in determining the end of the war.

Crucial missing questions

The aftermath of two hurricanes supercharged by climate change didn’t prompt 60 Minutes to ask any questions about climate (CBS, 9/30/24).

Though Whitaker took time to ask Harris what kind of gun she owns and Walz whether he can be “trusted to tell the truth,” he didn’t ask a single question about abortion, other healthcare issues, the climate crisis or gun control. These are all remarkable omissions.

A Pew Research survey (9/9/24) found abortion was a “very important” issue to more than half of all voters, and to two-thirds of Harris supporters. But Whitaker asked no questions about what Harris and Walz would do to protect or restore reproductive rights across the US.

The healthcare system was another glaring omission by 60 Minutes, though it is voters’ second-most important issue, according to the same Pew Research survey; 65% of all voters, and 76% of Harris supporters, said that healthcare was “very important” to their vote.

Healthcare only came up as part of an accusation that “you have changed your position on so many things”: Along with shifts on immigration and fracking, Whittaker noted that “you were for Medicare for all, now you’re not,” with the result that “people don’t truly know what you believe or what you stand for.” Like a very similar question asked of Harris during the debate (FAIR.org, 9/13/24), it seemed crafted to press Harris on whether her conversion from left-liberal to centrist was genuine, rather than to elicit real solutions for a population with the highest healthcare costs and the lowest life expectancy of any wealthy nation.

At a moment when Hurricane Helene had just wreaked massive destruction across the Southeast and Hurricane Milton was already promising to deliver Florida its second devastating storm in two weeks, the lack of climate questions was striking. While voters tend to rank climate policy as a lower priority than issues like the economy or immigration, large majorities are concerned about it—and it’s an urgent issue with consequences that can’t be understated. Yet the only time climate was alluded to was in the flip-flop question, which included the preface, “You were against fracking, now you’re for it.”

Similarly, a mass shooting in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four people just over three weeks ago; as of this writing (10/15/24), the Gun Violence Archive reported that gun violence, excluding suicide, has killed 13,424 Americans this year. In 2019, the American Psychological Association reported that one-third of Americans said that fear of mass shootings stops them from going to certain places and events. In a Pew Research survey (4/11/24), 59% of public K-12 teachers said they are at least somewhat worried about the possibility of a shooting at their school, and 23% have experienced a lockdown.

Yet the two questions Whitaker asked about guns had nothing to do with these realities or fears, or what a Harris/Walz administration would do about them. Instead, he asked Harris, “What kind of gun do you own, and when and why did you get it?” (Harris answered, “I have a Glock, and I have had it for quite some time.”) Whitaker followed up by asking Harris if she had ever fired it. (She said she had, at a shooting range.)

‘Out of step’

Walz was mostly asked non-policy questions, things like “Whether you can be trusted to tell the truth,” and why his calling Republicans “weird” has become a “rallying cry for Democrats.”

In keeping with the media’s preoccupation with pushing Democratic candidates to the right, the governor was asked to respond to charges that he was “dangerously liberal” and part of the “radical left“: “What do you say to that criticism, that rather than leading the way, you and Minnesota are actually out of step with the rest of the country?”

The right-wing framing of many of the questions asked, and the important issues ignored, might make CBS think about how in step it is with the country and its needs.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Elsie Carson-Holt.

In a surprise visit to Ukraine on 9 April [2022], British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said “Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with,” and that the collective West was not willing to make a deal with Putin. Three days after Johnson left Kyiv, Putin stated publicly that talks with Ukraine “had turned into a dead end”. Naftali Bennett said in 2023 that both sides had wanted a ceasefire, the odds of the deal holding had been 50-50, and that the Western powers backing Ukraine had stopped the deal.^[79]

Mr. Johnson had received U.S. President Joe Biden’s authorization to do that — to go to  Ukraine’s President Volodmyr Zelensky to inform him that The West (the U.S. empire, including NATO) would cease supporting Ukraine’s Government if Ukraine would sign the till-then-agreed-upon but not-yet-signed peace treaty with Russia, which entailed Russia’s ceasing its invasion in return for Ukraine’s returning to its neutral status which had prevailed prior to the US. Government’s take-over of Ukraine on 20 February 2014, and Ukraine’s ceasing its efforts to restore to Ukraine the 22% of the former Ukraine’s territory that Russia then was occupying. Biden insisted upon the Ukrainian Government’s pursuing an all-or-nothing strategy to defeat Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine — or else Ukraine would lose Western support in its war against Russia. (The reason for this policy from Biden is that though such a peace treaty would have been far better for Ukraine, since the million-or-so deaths, that continuing the war entails, would have been prevented, such a treaty would have totally ended America’s ownership of Ukraine, which was won by the Obama-Biden Administration’s stunningly successful coup in February 2014, which grabbed control of Ukraine away from the people of Ukraine. The U.S. Government wants to continue controlling Ukraine’s Government.)

Publicly, the U.S. Government continues to insist upon a total defeat of Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine. However, it also states that, “as we have been consistently saying, it’s going to be up to President Zelenskyy, if and when he wants to negotiate an end to this war. Certainly, a negotiated end is the most likely outcome here. But when that happens, and under what conditions and circumstances, that’s going to be up to President Zelenskyy.” In other words: if Ukraine’s Government will lose the war against Russia, and Russia will win the war against Ukraine, then (according to the Biden Administration) only Ukraine’s Government will have lost it; the U.S. Government and its NATO military alliance won’t also have lost it. This is the message from the White House, two-and-a-half years after it had ordered Ukraine’s Government to continue this war until Russia will have been defeated.

All U.S. regime media are trying to either blame Ukraine’s Government, or else blame the Government (i.e., the U.S. Government) that has, in fact, been controlling Ukraine’s Government, for Ukraine’s losing this war. Domestically within the United States, the Biden Administration and its Vice President Kamala Harris would rather that Ukraine’s defeat be held off till after the November 5 elections, so that their Party will win on November 5. But, if the defeat comes after she has won the election, then there will be total pressure upon Zelensky to quit before she becomes inaugurated on January 20th, so that this loss won’t be blamed upon her — won’t occur during her Presidency.

On September 30, The Atlantic magazine, which is owned by the Democratic Party billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, the intensely neoconservative widow and heir of Steve Jobs, headlined “The Abandonment of Ukraine: The American strategy in Ukraine is slowly bleeding the nation, and its people, to death.” It argued against “the most unsettling thing we saw [in Ukraine] was the American strategy in Ukraine, one that gives the Ukrainian people just enough military aid not to lose their war but not enough to win it. This strategy is slowly bleeding Ukraine, and its people, to death.” And it closed:

The war in Ukraine is at risk of being lost — not because the Russians are winning but because Ukraine’s allies have not allowed them to win. If we encourage the Ukrainians to fight while failing to give them the tools they need for victory, history will surely conclude that the Russians weren’t the only ones who committed crimes against Ukraine.

How can this be “not because the Russians are winning”? How not only definitionally false, but outright stupid, is that statement? 925,872 people in the deceived U.S. empire are paying subscription fees for such neocon propaganda, basically pushing for WW3. What Ms. Jobs’s agents are arguing for there is to escalate this war to being a direct war between the U.S. Government (and all of its ‘allies’ or colonies) versus Russia’s Government and Russia’s people. How many Americans really even want that — WW3 — in order to continue the U.S. Government’s control over what still remains of Ukrainian territory? Is Ukraine necessary for protecting U.S. national security? Of course not. But if you are a rabidly neocon Democrat, then you want the Biden-Harris Administration to go at least to the brink of WW3, if necessary, in order to prevent the loss of Ukraine.

What the Democratic Party half of America’s Deep State — and Ms. Jobs is part of that — are doing is to try to force the Democratic Party officials to go all the way up to WW3 if that’s what it takes in order to ‘win’ against Russia in Ukraine. This is what’s called a “proxy war.” It has, all along, been part of the U.S. regime’s long war to conquer Russia. Russian citizens have been well informed about this, but the subjects in the U.S. empire have not.

On 2 October 2024, EurAsia Daily headlined the video of a former adviser to the head of the office of the President of Ukraine, Alexei Arestovich, who had advised President Zelensky at the Istanbul peace negotiations in 2022, “The Ukrainian front is collapsing, the loss of Coal is only the beginning of a catastrophe — Arestovich,” and presented him saying, “The training system has failed, there is no basic motivation in the troops, but there is an understanding that the stated goal of the war — reaching the borders of 1991 — is unrealistic in these specific circumstances. In addition, there is no motivation due to domestic politics, where every day those in power put forward new proposals on restrictions on citizens – from cultural and language bans to economic ones, new corruption scandals open almost every day and the mess in the management of the army and the state intensifies.”

A “DavidZ” posted also on October 2nd lengthier quotations from Arestovich’s video:

“In two to three months, well, three to four, the front, which is currently crumbling in two directions, and slowly retreating in three, will begin to crumble in six or seven. This flow will become uncontrollable. This means a collapse of the front,” he said.

He stated that in this case, the Russian army will shift the war to maneuver warfare, leading to “the collapse of the front as such.”

“When all these 700,000 with automatic weapons and artillery cannot hold the front line, the enemy will start to rapidly advance inward, cutting off Kharkov and reaching Poltava, Dnepr, and Zaporozhye. This will lead to the loss of key industrial centers of Ukraine,” the former presidential office advisor noted.

Arestovych identified the main reason for what is happening as the lack of a reserve of motivated infantry.

“No drones can help reach the borders of any year if infantry soldiers do not walk this path under enemy fire… The training system has failed, there is a lack of basic motivation in the troops, but there is an understanding that the declared goal of the war – reaching the borders of 1991 – is unrealistic under these specific circumstances,” he explained.

“Moreover, motivation is lacking due to internal politics, where every day new proposals are put forward by the powerful to limit citizens’ rights: from cultural and language bans to economic restrictions. Almost every day, new corruption scandals emerge, and the chaos in the management of the army and the state intensifies,” added the former presidential office advisor.

Arestovych believes that “now the only way out is to sober up, stop the war, and begin a complete reorganization of the state system.”

On 26 October 2024, the widely respected military-affairs blogger “Simplicius,” headlined  “SITREP 10/5/24: Post-Ugledar Landscape Unfurls into Dark Ukrainian Future,” and reported, from numerous reliable sources on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine, the end closing-in on the existing Government of Ukraine. One in Ukraine headlined on October 2nd, (translated) “’We Simply Had No One and Nothing Left to Fight with’ — A Rpresentative of the 72nd Brigade Battalion Headquarters on Leaving Vuhledar.” It reported:

After two years of defense of Vuhledar, the Ukrainian military withdrew from the city. Today, the Khortytsia operational and strategic grouping of troops officially announced this: ‘Having suffered numerous losses as a result of prolonged fighting, the enemy did not give up trying to capture Vuhledar. In an attempt to take control of the town at any cost, they managed to send reserves to conduct flanking attacks that exhausted the defenses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. As a result of the enemy’s actions, the city was threatened with encirclement. The Higher Command gave permission for a maneuver to withdraw units from Vuhledar in order to save personnel and military equipment, and to take up a position for further actions.’

That was a long and strategically crucial battle.

Also on October 6, Russia’s RT News headlined “Russian ambassador to US returns home: Anatoly Antonov has left Washington, during a period of fractured ties between the two countries,” and reported that, “‘The Russian ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, has ended his service in Washington and is on his way to Moscow,’ the Foreign Ministry said in a brief statement carried by Russian news agencies. The ministry did not provide any additional details and has so far not named his successor.” This is normally the sort of thing that happens shortly before a war breaks out between two countries, in order to protect their diplomats from dangers where they are, such as becoming hit by their own country’s weapons.

Both of the two U.S. Presidential nominees have been saying nothing about whether, as the President, they would go all the way to WW3 in order to prevent Russia from winning in Ukraine. And none of the ‘news’ media have asked about that. The only possible exception is that on September 17, Donald Trump co-authored with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at The Hill, “Negotiate with Moscow to end the Ukraine war and prevent nuclear devastation,” which contradicts not only what Kamala Harris has said, but some of the things that Trump has said. It is entirely consistent, however, with what RFK Jr. has been saying. On the other hand, even Mr. Kennedy has not addressed specifically the question of whether, as the President, he would go all the way to WW3 in order to prevent Russia from winning in Ukraine. So: there has been no public discussion of such a question. Perhaps the American pubic don’t even care about it. Would most people be interested in a candidate’s position on it? If not, then is this a democracy? And if so, then is this a democracy? In fact, wouldn’t a democracy be focused upon this issue above any other? Americans aren’t focusing upon it at all. Nor are the publics in any of the U.S. Government’s colonies.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

In her closing speech during the 2024 Democratic National Convention, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris presented the most openly militaristic take on Washington’s Korea policy “since the GOP convention that nominated [Senator Barry] Goldwater in 1964.” Harris’ hawkish view all but discards diplomacy to focus on herding South Korea and Japan together to form a US-led military triad to confront Chinese interests in East Asia. The candidate’s stance, echoed by the majority of the democratic party, raises what has been called a “truly baffling” prospect of a “Democratic president more aggressive towards [North Korea] than her Republican counterpart.”

This comes at a time when the virtually nonstop US-led war drills in South Korea have achieved a level of scope and intensity that far exceeds even that of the Cold War.  Taking place in the heavily militarized Korean Peninsula and ostensibly directed at the ubiquitous “North Korean threat,” these exercises are in fact a preparation for a future US-led war against China as part of Washington’s bold new Indo-Pacific strategy.

These momentous developments cap two years of virtually unabated military maneuvers at North Korea’s doorstep, beginning in 2023 with:

• 250+ days of US and South Korean joint war drills
• 21 instances in which US strategic assets, including nuclear-capable weapon platforms, were deployed to South Korea
• 10+ UN Command joint military maneuvers

From January 1 to August 10, 2024 there have been:

• 180 days of US and South Korean joint war drills
•  17 instances in which US strategic assets, including nuclear-capable weapon platforms, were deployed to South Korea

With the advent of the Biden administration, the prospect of a negotiated peace with North Korea all but vanished with the ultimate collapse of the modest confidence-building agreement in 2018 between Seoul and Pyongyang and South Korea, and Washington’s North Korea policy shifted to empowering South Korea’s autocratic Yoon administration to spearhead the “end of the North Korean regime” while the US steadily incorporates Korean military potential into its anti–China front.

The “North Korean threat” has long served as the justification for the increasingly formidable US forward military position in Asia, but how much of a threat does North Korea actually pose to the US?

North Korea spends only $4 billion annually on defense while the US annual defense budget is close to $900 billion. For North Korea to engage in the offensive use of its military against the US would be little short of suicide.

In addition to this basic fact, the commander of US Forces Korea himself, Gen. Paul LaCamera, has openly stated that North Korea’s military posture and policy is to establish deterrence and defend its sovereignty, and has characterized Kim Jong-un’s top priorities as “regime survivability” and “preparing to defend his nation.”

Kim himself has repeatedly stated that North Korea: “will never unilaterally unleash a war.”  Kim’s most urgent priority has been economic development under the “Regional Development 20×10 Policy,” an ambitious 10-year-plan to provide badly-needed improvements to civilian infrastructure and services for ordinary North Koreans.

In spite of the relentlessly “manufactured image of a war-mad Kim Jong-un,” recent opinion polls show that only 2% of Americans named North Korea as a threat to the US, apparently evincing the common-sense realization that a weak country’s deterrent posture is not regarded as a real threat to the United States.

Coexistence is an overlooked option

Current US policy in the Korean peninsula is an extension of its Indo-Pacific doctrine, and relies on coupling economic warfare with military and political pressure against Pyongyang to maintain the level of tension required for the continued deployment of US forward assets against China.

As Washington veers ever further into its collision course with China, it has recast South Korea as a “linchpin of the US-China strategy in Northeast Asia”; deepening the integration of US assets with South Korean conventional forces and inducting local troops to serve under US command as cannon fodder for a brewing regional war far beyond the confines of the Korean Peninsula.

The US considers tensions in the Korean Peninsula necessary to justify its forward position in East Asia, which is underpinned by the garrisons it maintains in South Korea and Japan and solidified by its de facto control over the nominally independent military forces of these states. The US has been attempting to prod Beijing into a conflict over Taiwan in the same manner as it has provoked Russia into war over the Ukraine.

One consequence of this strategy is that Washington’s hostility towards North Korea is becoming ever more entrenched in US foreign policy, with the US provoking South Korea, a US client state that lacks strategic independence, to escalate tensions with Pyongyang as a prelude to instigating a regional conflict with China. Under the pretext of deterring North Korea, the US is forcing South Korea into a brewing confrontation with China, in which the primary role of the South Korean military would be to tie down vital Chinese forces in a bloody inter-Korean conflict, giving the US a freer hand in the broader theater of operations.

To help cement its hold over South Korea at this crucial juncture in Washington’s grand Indo-Pacific strategy, the Biden administration has propped up the authoritarian and deeply unpopular President Yoon Seok-yeol, whose signature foreign policy platform is a steadfast commitment to allowing his nation to be dragooned into the brewing US war with China. According to the latest opinion survey, more than 66% of South Koreans think that Yoon’s subordination to the US Indo-Pacific strategy makes Korea less safe.

But what if relations with the North were treated as an inter-Korean or even a purely regional issue, and were decoupled from Washington’s broader anti-China strategy? The prospect of coexistence with the North possesses immense potential for stability and prosperity in the region.

A North Korea free of US-led sanctions and unburdened by an overriding drive to shore up national  defense could arguably be a regional economic powerhouse. Given that North Korea has been vigorously pushing for ambitious economic development since its last nuclear weapons test in 2017, analysts foresee the North achieving meaningful economic development under the right conditions.

If geopolitical conditions evolve to the point where some initial meaningful economic engagement becomes possible for the US and South Korea, Kim’s domestic agenda offers important benchmarks for collaboration and support that should be a starting point for helping him achieve success on improvements in the lives of the North Korean people.

An economically integrated Korean peninsula in a multipolar Northeast Asia has the potential to be the “world’s next epicenter of change,” placing the combined economy of the Korean peninsula second only to China, the US, and India, with the North accounting for approximately one-fourth of this total economic potential.

Arguably, a fundamental geopolitical shift with respect to North Korean economic integration is already underway: namely, the gradual erosion of US economic isolation as the North strengthens its ties with the two of the world’s largest economies: Russia and China. These developments occur at a critical historical juncture shaped by an increasing trend toward multipolarity coupled with the shifting geopolitical balance of power in Northeast Asia.

America’s long-term strategic interest lies in unlocking the potential domestic benefits to the US of opening up the North Korean economy rather than attempting to maintain its hegemony through the relentless pursuit of regional destabilization in preparation for a future Sino-American conflict.

Washington should instead work to reduce regional tensions by halting the increasingly provocative nuclear-conventional war games in the Korean Peninsula and putting US-North Korea normalization at the center of US foreign policy.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Simone Chun.

In her closing speech during the 2024 Democratic National Convention, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris presented the most openly militaristic take on Washington’s Korea policy “since the GOP convention that nominated [Senator Barry] Goldwater in 1964.” Harris’ hawkish view all but discards diplomacy to focus on herding South Korea and Japan together to form a US-led military triad to confront Chinese interests in East Asia. The candidate’s stance, echoed by the majority of the democratic party, raises what has been called a “truly baffling” prospect of a “Democratic president more aggressive towards [North Korea] than her Republican counterpart.”

This comes at a time when the virtually nonstop US-led war drills in South Korea have achieved a level of scope and intensity that far exceeds even that of the Cold War.  Taking place in the heavily militarized Korean Peninsula and ostensibly directed at the ubiquitous “North Korean threat,” these exercises are in fact a preparation for a future US-led war against China as part of Washington’s bold new Indo-Pacific strategy.

These momentous developments cap two years of virtually unabated military maneuvers at North Korea’s doorstep, beginning in 2023 with:

• 250+ days of US and South Korean joint war drills
• 21 instances in which US strategic assets, including nuclear-capable weapon platforms, were deployed to South Korea
• 10+ UN Command joint military maneuvers

From January 1 to August 10, 2024 there have been:

• 180 days of US and South Korean joint war drills
•  17 instances in which US strategic assets, including nuclear-capable weapon platforms, were deployed to South Korea

With the advent of the Biden administration, the prospect of a negotiated peace with North Korea all but vanished with the ultimate collapse of the modest confidence-building agreement in 2018 between Seoul and Pyongyang and South Korea, and Washington’s North Korea policy shifted to empowering South Korea’s autocratic Yoon administration to spearhead the “end of the North Korean regime” while the US steadily incorporates Korean military potential into its anti–China front.

The “North Korean threat” has long served as the justification for the increasingly formidable US forward military position in Asia, but how much of a threat does North Korea actually pose to the US?

North Korea spends only $4 billion annually on defense while the US annual defense budget is close to $900 billion. For North Korea to engage in the offensive use of its military against the US would be little short of suicide.

In addition to this basic fact, the commander of US Forces Korea himself, Gen. Paul LaCamera, has openly stated that North Korea’s military posture and policy is to establish deterrence and defend its sovereignty, and has characterized Kim Jong-un’s top priorities as “regime survivability” and “preparing to defend his nation.”

Kim himself has repeatedly stated that North Korea: “will never unilaterally unleash a war.”  Kim’s most urgent priority has been economic development under the “Regional Development 20×10 Policy,” an ambitious 10-year-plan to provide badly-needed improvements to civilian infrastructure and services for ordinary North Koreans.

In spite of the relentlessly “manufactured image of a war-mad Kim Jong-un,” recent opinion polls show that only 2% of Americans named North Korea as a threat to the US, apparently evincing the common-sense realization that a weak country’s deterrent posture is not regarded as a real threat to the United States.

Coexistence is an overlooked option

Current US policy in the Korean peninsula is an extension of its Indo-Pacific doctrine, and relies on coupling economic warfare with military and political pressure against Pyongyang to maintain the level of tension required for the continued deployment of US forward assets against China.

As Washington veers ever further into its collision course with China, it has recast South Korea as a “linchpin of the US-China strategy in Northeast Asia”; deepening the integration of US assets with South Korean conventional forces and inducting local troops to serve under US command as cannon fodder for a brewing regional war far beyond the confines of the Korean Peninsula.

The US considers tensions in the Korean Peninsula necessary to justify its forward position in East Asia, which is underpinned by the garrisons it maintains in South Korea and Japan and solidified by its de facto control over the nominally independent military forces of these states. The US has been attempting to prod Beijing into a conflict over Taiwan in the same manner as it has provoked Russia into war over the Ukraine.

One consequence of this strategy is that Washington’s hostility towards North Korea is becoming ever more entrenched in US foreign policy, with the US provoking South Korea, a US client state that lacks strategic independence, to escalate tensions with Pyongyang as a prelude to instigating a regional conflict with China. Under the pretext of deterring North Korea, the US is forcing South Korea into a brewing confrontation with China, in which the primary role of the South Korean military would be to tie down vital Chinese forces in a bloody inter-Korean conflict, giving the US a freer hand in the broader theater of operations.

To help cement its hold over South Korea at this crucial juncture in Washington’s grand Indo-Pacific strategy, the Biden administration has propped up the authoritarian and deeply unpopular President Yoon Seok-yeol, whose signature foreign policy platform is a steadfast commitment to allowing his nation to be dragooned into the brewing US war with China. According to the latest opinion survey, more than 66% of South Koreans think that Yoon’s subordination to the US Indo-Pacific strategy makes Korea less safe.

But what if relations with the North were treated as an inter-Korean or even a purely regional issue, and were decoupled from Washington’s broader anti-China strategy? The prospect of coexistence with the North possesses immense potential for stability and prosperity in the region.

A North Korea free of US-led sanctions and unburdened by an overriding drive to shore up national  defense could arguably be a regional economic powerhouse. Given that North Korea has been vigorously pushing for ambitious economic development since its last nuclear weapons test in 2017, analysts foresee the North achieving meaningful economic development under the right conditions.

If geopolitical conditions evolve to the point where some initial meaningful economic engagement becomes possible for the US and South Korea, Kim’s domestic agenda offers important benchmarks for collaboration and support that should be a starting point for helping him achieve success on improvements in the lives of the North Korean people.

An economically integrated Korean peninsula in a multipolar Northeast Asia has the potential to be the “world’s next epicenter of change,” placing the combined economy of the Korean peninsula second only to China, the US, and India, with the North accounting for approximately one-fourth of this total economic potential.

Arguably, a fundamental geopolitical shift with respect to North Korean economic integration is already underway: namely, the gradual erosion of US economic isolation as the North strengthens its ties with the two of the world’s largest economies: Russia and China. These developments occur at a critical historical juncture shaped by an increasing trend toward multipolarity coupled with the shifting geopolitical balance of power in Northeast Asia.

America’s long-term strategic interest lies in unlocking the potential domestic benefits to the US of opening up the North Korean economy rather than attempting to maintain its hegemony through the relentless pursuit of regional destabilization in preparation for a future Sino-American conflict.

Washington should instead work to reduce regional tensions by halting the increasingly provocative nuclear-conventional war games in the Korean Peninsula and putting US-North Korea normalization at the center of US foreign policy.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Simone Chun.

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.

Q: Why will there never be a coup d’état in Washington?

A: Because there’s no American embassy there.

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.

• See also a related article: “A Moral Imperative for the 2024 US Elections.”

ENDNOTES:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by B.R. Gowani.

So, how can Americans signal their abhorrence for genocide?

Americans have been locked in a pattern of voting for the political duopoly: either wing of the business party. It is widely held that on most major matters there is little to separate the Democrats and Republicans. And this has led to many Americans voting based on whichever party is perceived to be the lesser evil.

Despite this lesser evilest-inspired voting, the election results have resulted in the presidency and congressional majority rotating between the Democrats and Republicans with little change in the US trajectory. As far as the US economy is concerned, the country has continued to increase its debt burden. As far as US foreign policy is concerned, the US has continued to wage wars abroad. As far as support for democracy is concerned, the US has continued to initiate coups against governments it does not approve of. As far as Israel is concerned, it continues to enjoy steadfast support from the duopoly.

One commonly heard refrain posits that continually resorting to the same action with expectation of a different result meets the definition of insanity. The expectation of lesser-evilist voting producing a significantly different outcome on the political scene given that such action has never brought about a change before speaks disparagingly to the strategy of lesser-evilist voting.

Being considered insane, however, is less disparaging than being considered immoral. That would be shameful.

Given the nugatory outcomes of lesser-evilist voting, another proposition comes to mind:

Fool me once, shame on you;
fool me twice, shame on me.

There are two candidates seen as frontrunners for the presidency of the United States. However, the Democratic Party candidate, Kamala Harris, and the Republican Party candidate, Donald Trump. Both stand solidly behind the Zionist entity dba as the state of Israel, and neither of these candidates will exert pressure on Israel to cease and desist in its commission of war crimes. In fact, the US funds Israel, arms Israel, and has situated its military and armaments in the region in support of Israel. This is despite Israeli officials openly calling for the eradication of Palestinians, causing a case to be brought against Israel charging it with genocide in the International Court of Justice.

The upshot of this is that a vote for either Harris or Trump must be considered as a vote for genocide. The only out for a voter to escape criticism for supporting genocide is, pathetic as it may be, ignorance.

What can Americans do to avoid supporting genocide? One can always abstain from voting. That, however, would not be fighting against genocide. Moreover, abstaining would still allow the supporters of genocide to vote for a genocidaire as president.

Strangely enough, many Americans seem oblivious to the existence of other presidential candidates that one can vote for. One can even cast a vote for a candidate opposed to Israeli crimes against Palestinians. To wit, there is candidate Cornel West who calls 7 October a “counter-terrorism response“; Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver has pledged to end the genocide; candidate Jill Stein has a platform Pledge to Stop Genocide.

Unfortunately, in a winner-take-all voting system, one must consider how the strong individual desire to attain political office plays against a tactical and selfless decision to coalesce around one anti-genocide candidate to increase the chances of shutting down a genocide in progress.

Voting in the US elections on 5 November 2024 is an opportunity to indicate one’s abhorrence to genocide. Elementary morality demands a vote for an opponent of genocide.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Let’s leave aside the existential threats of climate change or nuclear war. However important, these issues are not on the November 5 ballot. Nor are they addressed in even minimally meaningful ways by the platforms of either of the major parties.

The USA, with its first-strike policy and upgrading its nuclear war fighting capacity, bears responsibility for Armageddon risk.  And, in fact, the land-of-the-free has contributed more greenhouse gases to the world’s stockpile than any other country.

But the US electorate never voted these conditions in, so is it realistic to think that we can vote them out? The electoral arena has its limits. Nevertheless, we are admonished, our vote is very important.

But do the two major parties offer meaningful choices?

Apparently, the 700 national security apparatchiks who signed a letter endorsing Kamala Harris think so. They fear that Trump is too soft on world domination. They find a comforting succor in Harris’s promise “to preserve the American military’s status as the most ‘lethal’ force in the world.” And oddly so do some left-liberals who welcome the security state, largely because they too don’t trust Trump with guiding the US empire.

Although a major left-liberal talking point is the 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.

But 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 left-liberals and their confederates embrace rather than oppose the security state.

Not only were the left-liberals enamored with the FBI’s “Saint” Robert Mueller, but they have welcomed the likes of George W. Bush and now Dick Cheney, because these war criminals also see the danger of Trump.

The Democratic Party has been captured by the foreign policy neoconservatives who are jumping the red ship for the blue one. It’s not that Donald Trump is in any way an anti-imperialist, but Kamala Harris is seen as a more effective imperialist and defender of elite rule.

The ruling class is united in supporting US imperial hegemony, but needs to work out how best to achieve it. The blue team is confident that the empire has the capability to aim the canons full blast at both Russia and China at the same time. And they tend to take a more multilateral approach to empire building.

The red team is a little more circumspect, concerned with imperial overreach. They advocate a staged strategy of China as the primary target and only secondarily against Russia. This suggests why Ukraine’s president-for-life, who is at war with Russia, in effect campaigned for Kamala in the swing state of Pennsylvania.

The inauthenticity of the left-liberals

 While some left-liberals support a decisive Russian defeat in Ukraine, their overall concern is beating Trump.

The Democratic Party was transformed some time ago by the Clintons’ now defunct but successful Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which advocated abandonment of its progressive constituencies in order to more effectively attract corporate support.  While both parties vie to serve the wealthy class, the Democrats are now by a significant margin the ones favored by big money.

The triumph of the DLC signaled the demise of liberalism and the ascendency of neoliberalism. Much more could be said about that transition (viz the Democratic Party has always been capitalist with neoliberalism being its most recent expression), but suffice it to say the Democratic Party is the graveyard of progressive movements.

Liberals no longer even pretend to have an agenda other than defeating Trump. Their neglect of economic issues that benefit working people has created a vacuum, which opens the political arena for faux populists like Trump.

The now moribund liberal movement is thus relegated to two functions: (1) providing a bogus progressive patina to reactionary politics and (2) attacking those who still hold leftist principles. “Progressive Democrat,” sociologist James Petras argues, is an oxymoron.

Left-liberals have the habit of prefacing their capitulations with a recitation of their former leftist credentials. But what makes them inauthentic is their abandonment of principles. No transgression by the Democrats, absolutely none – not even genocide – deters this inauthentic left from supporting the Democratic presidential candidate.

We can respect, though disagree, with the right-wing for having principled red lines, such as abortion. In contrast, left-liberals not only find themselves bedfellows with Cheney, but they swallow anything and everything that the Democratic wing of the two-party duopoly feeds them.

Consequences of supporting the lesser of the two evils

 Although today the Democratic Party is arguably the leading war party, we would have cold comfort with the Republicans in power. And domestically the Democrats talk a better line on some social wedge issues that don’t threaten elite rule, such as women’s reproductive rights, although – as will be argued – their walk is not as good as their talk.

Getting back to “this year more than ever we have to support the Democratic presidential candidate,” the plea contains two truths. First, the “more than ever” part exposes a tendency to cry wolf in the past.

Remember that the world did not fall apart with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. No lesser an authority than Noam Chomsky is nostalgic for Tricky Dick, who is now viewed as the last true liberal president. Nor did the planet stop spinning in 1980 when Ronald Reagan ascended to the Oval Office. Barack Obama now boasts that his policies differed little from the Gipper’s.

Which brings us to the second truth revealed in the plea. The entire body politic has been staggering to the right regardless of which wing of the duopoly is in power. This is in spite of the fact that the voting public is well to the left of them on almost every issue, from universal public healthcare to opposition to endless war.

Moreover, the left-liberals’ lesser-evil voting strategy itself bears some degree of responsibility for this reactionary tide.

The genius of the Clintons’ DLC was that the progressive New Deal coalition of labor and minority groups that supported the Democratic Party could be thrown under the bus with impunity, while the party courts the right. As long as purported progressives support the Democrats no matter what, the party has an incentive to sell out its left-leaning “captured constituents.”

Thus, we witnessed what passed for a presidential debate with both contestants competing to prove who was more in favor of genocide for Palestinians and an ever expanding military.

The campaign for reproductive rights aborted

 But one may protest, let’s not let squeamishness about genocide blind us to the hope that the Democrats are better than the Republicans on at least the key issue of abortion.

However, this is the exception that proves the rule. As Margaret Kimberley of the Black Agenda Report noted, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, there were protests everywhere but at Barack Obama’s house, “the person who could have acted to protect the Roe decision.”

When Obama ran in 2008, he made passage of a Freedom of Choice Act the centerpiece of his campaign. Once elected with majorities in Congress, he could have enshrined abortion rights into law and out of the purview of the Supreme Court. Instead, he never followed through on his promise.

This was a direct outcome of the logic of lesser evilism in a two-party system. The folks who supported abortion rights had nowhere to go, so they were betrayed. Why embarrass Blue Dog Democrats and antagonize pro-lifers when the progressive dupes will always give the Democrats a pass?

Angst is not a substitute for action

 The Republican and Democratic parties are part of the same corporate duopoly, both of which support the US empire. Given there are two wings, there will inevitably be a lesser and greater evil on every issue and even in every election.

However, we need a less myopic view and to look beyond a given election to see the bigger picture of the historical reactionary trend exacerbated by lesser-evil voting. That is, to understand that the function of lesser-evil voting in the overarching two-party system is to allow the narrative to shift rightward.

If one’s game plan for system change includes electoral engagement, which both Marx and Lenin advocated (through an independent working class party, not by supporting a bourgeois party), the pressure needs to be applied when it counts. And that might mean taking a tip from the Tea Party by withholding the vote if your candidate crosses a red line. But that requires principles, which left-liberals have failed to evidence. Angst, however heartfelt, is not a substitute for action.

The left-liberals’ lesser-evil voting, which disregards third-parties with genuinely progressive politics, contributes to the rightward trajectory of US politics. It is not the only factor, but it is a step in the wrong direction. As for November 5, we already know who will win…the ruling class.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

As Cheney put it after a speech at Duke University: “Those of us who believe in the defense of our democracy and the defense of our Constitution and the survival of our Republic have a duty in this election cycle to come together and to put those things above politics.”

But even more mind-blowing to us (and Democratic leaders) was that father Dick Cheney , president George W. Bush’s powerful, two-term vice president, supported her decision and also endorsed Harris. Trump, he said: “can never be trusted with power again.”

Moreover, the Cheneys’ endorsements say something far, far deeper about human relations in this fractious election crisis. It might lead to millions of men changing their minds about voting for a woman president—or any woman seeking public office. Smart and strong women have existed elsewhere in the world for centuries from Cleopatra and Golda Meir to former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Or most men believing a vice presidency doesn’t qualify Harris for the White House, despite predecessors like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. They, like Harris, were U.S. Senators and experienced on how the White House operates in handling foreign and domestic affairs great and small.

At the heart of male prejudice about strong and smart women’s competence for any political office seems to be the ancient cultural fear of being stripped of power by those perceived as inferiors.

Perhaps the only two times fear of such women dissipates and true equality begins is either at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or between proud fathers and those strong, smart daughters. For example, King Henry VIII and daughter Queen Elizabeth I and Pelosi’s father, Baltimore Mayor and House member Tommy D’Alesandro Jr., in wielding public power.  A true kinship of respect, political training, and love—and tough  decision-making—is the reality. It should overcome bias against women seeking public office.

Interestingly, Author Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of America’s greatest authors (1804-1864) focused largely on this subject of foolish fears about strong and smart women.

Brought up in penury with two sisters by a young widowed mother, he knew economic and social chauvinism and trivialization of women firsthand, doled out by men of every class. He married an intellectual and emotional peer, and fathered two outspoken daughters. In college, he also appears to have studied the revolutionary ideas by Jean-Jacques Rousseau about equality at all levels.

Moreover, as the descendant of a harsh judge in the Salem witchcraft trials  of 1692-93, he probably would have agreed with author Virginia Woolf. She believed such women were hanged or set ablaze not for religious error, but because they threatened men’s desperate need to control other men, but, most of all, powerful and defiant women. Then, by labeling them witches. Today, it’s “bitches”.

To Hawthorne, such women were equal companions, not threats to men. He never viewed them as unimportant or as threatening Delilahs, but, rather, as men’s vital emotional, intellectual, and spiritual partners. As a writer, his mission seemed to be overcoming most men’s deep-rooted fears of the strong and smart. Yet to carry such a message in the literature of his day was a monumental undertaking.

He laid the fundamental cause at ending men’s monopoly on control and power. His novels and short stories were the first in this country to focus on the rigid second-class roles assigned women for life. Initially, he disguised this view in allegorical short stories. He finally threw that cloak aside with his 1844 masterpiece “Rappaccini’s Daughter” about the usual tragic result of male fears. The allegory was poison.

Rappaccini is a brilliant and famed botanist with an experimental garden of toxic plants tended by daughter Beatrice, now immune to their poisons and up for a university post in that field. She is spotted by Giovanni, an older student, from his boarding house balcony who is struck by her beauty as she feeds and waters the deadly garden. It becomes love at first sight for both. He enters the garden despite her warnings. Soon, however, he becomes frightened of losing domination expected of men over all women, powerful and brilliant though they be. Made immune to all the poisons, he accuses her of killing him. There may be no finer breakup line than Beatrice’s heartbroken:  “Was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?”

That allegoric lesson applies to most biased and fearful men when it comes to women and seeking public office. Put the case another way:

If they had daughters running for any position in the upcoming elections, wouldn’t they proudly tout them to friends, neighbors, work cohorts, and the cashier and line-mates at the supermarket? Maybe help finance their campaigns? Or put up yard or window signs and paste bumper stickers on their cars? Do phone banking? Canvass the neighborhood? And with any action, wouldn’t they insist their daughters were as capable for office as male opponents?

In other words, if fathers—and mothers,too—don’t fear powerful daughters, why fear smart, strong women candidates on November 5? They’re somebody’s daughters, too, and just as worthy of fair consideration as any male on the ballot.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Barbara G. Ellis.

A Scripps/Ipsos poll (9/18/24) reported that “a majority of Americans support mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.” The phrasing dovetails with the Trump campaign’s promise that such a deportation is exactly what a second Trump administration would undertake.

Numerous other media outlets (e.g., C-SPAN, CBS News, Reuters, among many others) immediately reported on the findings, given their political significance. “Donald Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan Is More Popular Than You Think,” was Newsweek‘s headline (9/18/24).

An examination of the poll questions and results, however, suggest that this measure of “public opinion” can hardly be taken seriously, because most people display a lack of engagement and, perhaps more importantly, understanding of the issue. By exploiting this lack of information, the pollsters create the illusion of strong public support.

Unengaged—but opinionated?

Questions in the poll address several different aspects of immigration, but it’s worth noting this one: “How closely are you following the news on the following topics: The immigration situation at the US/Mexican border?” Just 23% said “very closely.” Another 36% said “somewhat closely,” and 40% admitted “not very” or “not at all closely.”

In short, a significant portion of the respondents in the poll is unengaged on this issue, while only a quarter is “very” engaged. Yet the poll presents over 90% of its respondents as having meaningful opinions about immigration questions.

Beyond people’s lack of engagement—which suggests that whatever opinions most of them give are not terribly strong—the Scripps/Ipsos poll also shows that the people it polled lack basic knowledge about the policy issue. This is made plain by responses to a question designed to find out how much people knew about responsibilities for immigration Kamala Harris had been assigned as vice president:

If a person is engaged and informed on the immigration situation at the US/Mexico border, they surely will know the answer to this question. Yet a mere 10% of the respondents chose the option that comes closest to explaining her responsibilities, which is highlighted in yellow: to address the reasons why migrants leave their home countries for the US.

KFF polling (9/24/24) indicates that many Americans are unsure about what is and isn’t true about immigration.

Granted, it’s a difficult time to be informed about immigration in this country. A recent KFF poll (9/24/24) found that a large majority of adults have heard false information from elected officials or candidates, such as the claim that “immigrants are causing an increase in violent crime in the US” or that “immigrants are taking jobs and causing an increase in unemployment for people born in the US.” And many of them—51% and 44%, respectively—think those false claims are “definitely” or “probably” true. (Both are also key talking points for the Trump campaign—as is the claim that Harris has been in charge of the southern border under Biden.)

The news outlets that are supposed to inform the citizenry about issues of public concern haven’t been much help. A FAIR examination (5/24/21) of establishment immigration coverage found it was characterized by “hyperbole about recent migration trends and an inexcusable lack of historical context.”

But rather than take its respondents’ overwhelming inability to answer a factual question about immigration policy as demonstrating a lack of information and understanding, Scripps framed it in its press release (9/18/24) as merely another opinion: “Voters couldn’t agree on Harris’s role on immigration policy, with 17% saying they believe she is responsible for securing the US/Mexico border and 20% unsure.”

Masking apathy

Despite the large segment of the polled population that was shown to be disengaged on the immigration issue, and the overwhelming number who had no idea what Harris’ responsibilities on immigration were, the poll reported 97% with an opinion on whether there should be a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants:

Of course, people can have opinions even if they have little to no information. But in that case, it’s important to at least give respondents an explicit opportunity to acknowledge they don’t have an opinion. The “forced-choice” question above provides no such explicit option.

The Scripps headline (9/18/24) neglected to clarify that mass deportation has “strong support” from less than a third of the public.

And although Scripps characterized the results as showing “strong support” for the proposal—”Though It Has Strong Support, Experts Say Mass Deportation Would Take Herculean Effort” was its headline (9/18/24) over a write-up of the poll—in fact, as the table illustrates, the results show only 30% with “strong support.”

As I explained in a different article for FAIR (9/28/23), people who indicate that they only “somewhat” support a policy proposal typically admit that they really don’t care one way or the other—that they would not be “upset” if the opposite happened to the position they just expressed. The “somewhat” option allows the unengaged to give an opinion and do their “job” as a respondent, even though they are not committed “strongly” to that view.

The table above shows that approximately half of the poll’s respondents felt strongly about their views—30% in favor, 23% opposed, with roughly the other half unengaged. Those results probably overstate somewhat the degree of public engagement, but it is much more realistic than the notion that 97% of Americans have a meaningful opinion on immigration policy.

Moreover, even many of those who report feeling “strongly” about it quite likely have no conception of what a “mass deportation” would mean. Instead of asking a vague question to an underengaged and underinformed public, the poll could have examined their understanding of the issue. It could ask respondents what the term means to them, how many immigrants would be involved, what they know about what undocumented immigrants actually do in this country, what impacts they think the deportation of immigrants might have. Asking these kinds of questions—rather than simply polling a campaign slogan—would have more honestly examined what people actually think about the issue.

The fundamental problem with public policy polling by the media is that they really don’t want to tell the truth about the American public—that on most issues, large segments of the public are simply too busy to keep informed and formulate meaningful opinions. Given that media’s prime function is to give the public the information it needs to make informed choices about civic issues, such disengagement is a warning that news outlets are not doing their job adequately.

But rather than take the public disconnect as an impetus to do better, media give us example after example of how “public opinion” polling can give the illusion of a fully engaged and informed public. By now, we should all know better.

Featured image: A Scripps video (9/18/24) falsely claims that the outlet’s poll found “strong support for mass deportations.”

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by David W. Moore.

Following the Democratic National Convention, the New York Times’ “Critic’s Notebook” (8/23/24) published an analysis of Vice President Kamala Harris’ pantsuit choices during the event.

“For the most important speech of her life, the presidential candidate dressed for more than identity politics,” read the subhead.

“In the end, she did not wear a white suit,” the piece began, later explaining the linkage between the color and its symbolism of women’s solidarity. Fashion critic Vanessa Friedman outlined the significance of Harris’ navy blue suit choice in accepting the Democratic nomination.

The New York Times (8/23/24) said that Kamala Harris came to her convention speech “dressed for more than identity politics.”

“Ms. Harris made a different choice. One that didn’t center her femininity—or feminism (that’s a given)—but rather her ability to do the job,” Friedman wrote, as if those points were mutually exclusive.

A politician’s fashion choices are undoubtedly symbolic. Friedman has also recently published pieces about Donald Trump’s use of his suits to define patriotism (6/14/24), JD Vance’s use of his beard to portray traditional masculinity (7/18/24) and Tim Walz’s use of rugged clothing to define his “regular guy” image (8/22/24).

In each of these instances, the white male politician is using his style to communicate a message about his—and his constituents’—identities. But only in the piece about Harris’ clothing choice does Friedman use the term “identity politics,” lauding her for not defaulting to “when in doubt, women wear white!”

In fact, a FAIR study of US newspapers found the overwhelming majority of times the vague term “identity politics” was mentioned, it was referring to Democrats and the left.

What is identity politics?

Even though the right has taken to derogatorily using it against the left, “identity politics” is commonly understood to mean forming political alliances based on identities like religion, ethnicity and social background.

That definition applies equally to MAGA Republicans’ explicit or implicit appeals to white, Christian and traditional gender identities as it does to the left’s emphasis on ethnic, sexual and religious minorities. The DNC and RNC’s pep-rally atmospheres are both designed to project unity under political—and politicized—identities.

But a FAIR study of newspaper coverage during the weeks of the Republican and Democratic national conventions found that news media largely peddle the right-wing application of the term. A search of Nexis’ “US Newspapers” database for the phrase “identity politics” during July 14–21 and August 18–25  turned up 52 articles (some of which were reprints in multiple outlets) that related to the major parties, their conventions, and their presidential and vice presidential candidates.  Forty-five of those articles used the term to refer to Democrats and the left, four used the term to refer to Republicans and the right, and three referred to both groups.

A New York Times opinion piece by Maureen Dowd (8/23/24) was one of the 45 articles that associated “identity politics” with Democrats and/or the left. It applauded Harris for how little she discussed her identity, except for promising that she’d sign a bill restoring abortion rights.

“Aside from that, she barely talked about gender and didn’t dwell on race, shrewdly positioning herself as a Black female nominee ditching identity politics,” Dowd wrote.

Harris “dwelling” on her race and gender—as someone who would be the first woman, first South Asian and second Black president in the country’s history—would have been poor judgment, Dowd implied.

“While the left is trying to divide us with identity politics,” the Arizona Republic (7/16/24) quoted an RNC speaker, “we believe that America is always, and should be, one nation under God.”

However, in two Arizona publications (Arizona Republic, 7/16/24, 7/19/24; Arizona Daily Star, 7/20/24), another woman emphasized her lived experience as “a single mother” to uphold her support of Trump—without the term “identity politics” being assigned to her. Instead, Sara Workman, one of the “everyday Americans” who spoke at the RNC, was quoted assigning it to Democrats:

“While the left is trying to divide us with identity politics, we are here tonight because we believe that America is always, and should be, one nation under God,” she said.

The irony of criticizing “identity politics” while invoking a line in the Pledge of Allegiance that was added to the oath in 1954 to assert the country’s Christian supremacy was lost on the outlets that published this quote.

Similarly, a piece referencing Vance playing up his “working-class roots” and “rags-to-riches” upbringing not only didn’t acknowledge the “identity politics” in such a presentation, but granted space to another Republican source to use the label derogatorily against the left (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/17/24). RNC committee member Harmeet Dhillon, was quoted saying Trump’s decision to pick the white, male Vance instead of “a woman or a minority” was “a sign of maturity and confidence in our party being able to succeed based on our ideas, not on identity politics.”

The ‘balance’ double standard

Another concerning idea echoed in the press was the assertion that Harris, simply by being a woman of color, would alienate white male voters, and therefore thank goodness she chose a white man as her running mate!

In the Detroit Free Press (8/22/24), a Republican wrote that Harris needed to “commit to ending identity politics” to get her vote.

In a commentary for the Detroit Free Press, headlined “Five Things Harris Can Do at DNC to Make This Michigan Never-Trump Republican Vote Democrat” (8/22/24), guest columnist Andrea Bitley listed “commit[ting] to ending identity politics” as one of her stipulations. It’s “historic” that Harris is a “woman of color,” Bitley wrote, then connected that to an important qualification: “However, returning to the heart and soul of democracy and broad-based politics that don’t play favorites with niche groups will make casting my vote easier.”

Bitley’s implication is that being Black, South Asian or a woman itself requires special effort to avoid pandering to identity groups—and ignores Donald Trump’s playing favorites with the extremely niche group of billionaires he counts himself among.

Before Harris officially became the Democratic nominee and announced Walz as her running mate, the Lexington Herald Leader (7/21/24) in Kentucky discussed the possibility of another white man, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, becoming the VP pick.

“If you’re looking to balance a ticket that’s headed by the first Black and South Asian woman presidential nominee, then having a young white guy provides pretty good balance,” Al Cross, longtime Kentucky political journalist and observer, told the outlet. He added, “We live in an era of identity politics, and his identity is a white guy.”

The New York Times (7/21/24) also reported:

Well aware of the cold reality of identity politics, Democrats assume that if Ms. Harris, the first Black and Asian American woman to be vice president, were nominated to the presidency, she would most likely balance her ticket with a white man.

In other words, the press regularly advises Harris to avoid identity politics at all costs—except when the identity being favored is white male.

These pieces did at least acknowledge that white and male are identities, but didn’t acknowledge the double-standard of Harris being called to “balance” her ticket out with a white man, when the last 43 of 46 presidencies have been held by white men with white male running mates.

Both-sidesing

Some say Donald Trump is a “threat to democratic values”; others say “identity politics” (and federal regulation) are the “true threat” (Boston Globe, 7/21/24).

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe equated the dangers of “identity politics” to Trump’s threat to democracy. Guest columnist (and former Washington bureau chief) David Shribman (7/21/24) quoted Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner:

The Republicans believe the country is halfway to the Soviet gulag. The Democrats believe the country is halfway to Adolf Hitler. They both see this election in apocalyptic terms.

Shribman continued:

Both sides—those who believe Donald Trump represents a threat to democratic values, and those who believe that identity politics and an inclination toward a highly regulatory federal government are the true threat—consider this year’s election a moment that will define the country for a generation.

People on the left believe Trump’s America is “halfway to Adolf Hitler” because many of his supporters are literal neo-Nazis. They believe Trump is a threat to democratic values because he encouraged his followers to carry out a deadly insurrection on the Capitol after he could not accept that he lost the 2020 election, and he is preparing to overturn the 2024 vote.

People on the right see the US as “halfway to the Soviet gulag” because…Democrats want you to acknowledge slavery and respect they/them pronouns?

This false equivalence is dangerous, and it is difficult to understand how white supremacy, a worldview based entirely on race, is not considered “identity politics” in this case.

Rare mentions of the right

Tressie McMillan Cottom (New York Times, 8/19/24): J.D. Vance’s evasions on his “childless cat ladies” line “reveal the wink-wink of today’s egregious right-wing identity politics and point to the ways that this election’s identity politics might play out through innuendo and metaphor.”

Out of the four articles that used the term “identity politics” to refer to the right, three were from New York Times writers.

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom (8/19/24) referred to the “egregious right-wing identity politics” in the context of Vance’s uncreative—and Gileadean—attacks on “childless cat ladies.” The Times‘ TV critic (7/19/24) also referenced the performance of macho male identity politics at the testosterone-laden displays at the RNC, saying, “This is what male identity politics looks like.”

Lydia Polgreen interrogated the derogatory application of the term “DEI candidate” to Harris, arguing that if Harris is a “DEI candidate,” so is Vance (New York Times, 7/21/24). Polgreen argued:

All politics is, at some level, identity politics—the business of turning identity into power, be it the identity of a candidate or demographic group or political party or region of the country.

Pointing out that white is a race, male is a gender and identity plays into all politics are arguments missing from most of the coverage, which failed to truly interrogate what people really mean when they apply these terms only to people of color and other minorities.

The fourth piece applying “identity politics” to the right came from the right-wing Washington Times (7/16/24) under a headline declaring that Black Republican speakers at the RNC “Put Identity Politics to Rest”—after leaning on their family “histories” that included slavery, cotton picking and “the  Jim Crow South.” “That was where the identity politics ended,” the paper assured readers.

Invisible identities

Race theorists like john a. powell have long interrogated the idea of whiteness and maleness being treated as “invisible” defaults:

White people have the luxury of not having to think about race. That is a benefit of being white, of being part of the dominant group. Just like men don’t have to think about gender. The system works for you, and you don’t have to think about it…. The Blacks have race; maybe Latinos have race; maybe Asians have race. But they’re just white. They’re just people. That’s part of being white.

Harris as vice president is a “symptom” of the Democrats’ “perspective…based on identity politics.” (San Diego Union Tribune, 7/21/24).

This belief that the normal, default human form is white and male is what allows people like Tom Shepard, a longtime San Diego political consultant quoted in the San Diego Union Tribune (7/21/24), to imply that Harris being chosen for the 2020 ticket as vice president is merely a symptom of the Democratic Party’s embrace of identity politics, and one of the “fundamental problems” with the party’s policy:

The Democratic Party, for all of its strengths, has over the last several decades kind of developed a perspective that is based on identity politics, and the reason that Kamala Harris was on the Democratic ticket as vice president is, at least in part, a symptom of that approach.

It’s the same reason why terms like Critical Race Theory (CRT), Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI), “diversity hire” and “identity politics” are used derogatorily against people of color, women and sexual minorities, disabled people and other underrepresented groups that dare to attempt to achieve equity with white men (CounterSpin, 8/8/24; FAIR.org, 7/10/21).

Without specificity in definition and equal application to either party’s politicking based on identities, “identity politics” becomes yet another dog-whistle used against those who simply dare to not be white or male.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Olivia Riggio.

The Middle Class Tax Cut

No matter how it is sliced, diced, or spiced, this middle class tax cut benefits nobody, harms the nation, and questions Harris’ credibility. The presidential aspirant said in her acceptance speech that she will be a president for all peoples in the nation. Singling out a tax cut for the more fortunate does not match her words. Unexplained is why this special class needs a tax cut.

Tax cuts are usual when demand is low, such as in a recession. The present economy is healthy with plenty, and I do mean plenty, of new Teslas in my middle class neighborhood. Elevated consumer demand is subsiding, noted by the decrease in consumer-inflated prices and increase in stock and housing market asset prices. Money is flowing into assets and a middle class tax cut will accelerate the trend.

Taxes transfer money between the government and the public. Neither method adds or subtracts to the money supply nor allows more or less available spending to the economy ─ the purchasing power stays the same, which means the purchasing of goods and services remain the same, and the GDP remains the same  Lowering taxes mainly assists the already employed, and that is not the major priority. Who pays taxes ─ the employed. Who receives tax breaks ─ those who pay taxes. Lowering taxes redistributes federal assistance from needy persons to the employed. Which is preferable, redistributing income so the employed have more to spend or redistributing the income so the underemployed have something to spend?

Stimulating the economy by tax breaks is a psychological phenomenon. The talk, exaggerations, promises, and general optimism of tax breaks fashion a more optimistic public, which supposedly stimulates spending, investment, and courage to carry more debt. Creeping in to the debate is another assumption ─ those who have excess funds will invest and stimulate growth. Not considered is they might invest in speculative ventures that only churn money or might purchase imports, which decreases purchasing power of domestic production.

GDP has steadily grown, with a few bumps, in the last 80 years, and no relation to lowering of taxes has been shown. A government report: Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945, Thomas L. Hungerford Specialist in Public Finance, September 14, 2012 at concludes:

The top income tax rates have changed considerably since the end of World War II. Throughout the late-1940s and 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was typically above 90%; today it is 35%. Additionally, the top capital gains tax rate was 25% in the 1950s and 1960s, 35% in the 1970s; today it is 15%. The average tax rate faced by the top 0.01% of taxpayers was above 40% until the mid-1980s; today it is below 25%. Tax rates affecting taxpayers at the top of the income distribution are currently at their lowest levels since the end of the second World War. The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution. As measured by IRS data, the share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S. families increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007-2009 recession. At the same time, the average tax rate paid by the top 0.1% fell from over 50% in 1945 to about 25% in 2009. Tax policy could have a relation to how the economic pie is sliced ─ lower top tax rates may be associated with greater income disparities.

Because taxable incomes do not include inflation and these have increased greatly during the last decades, it is difficult to compare tax rates in 2024 with earlier tax rates. Peering through data, they seem just as low as they were in 2014, when the government report was published, or at a near historic post-World War II low. Why go lower?

Tax Deduction of up to $50,000 for New Small Businesses

The principal hindrance to starting a small business is the high interest rate. Tax deductions will not help small businesses that have no access to funds and no profits to tax. The proposal affects a minor portion of the small business community and is subsidized by a major portion of the economy ─ those who can also use tax breaks.

This tax benefit is a policy seeking a problem. Newly created small businesses have exploded in the post-pandemic period. An April, 2024 Treasury Department report relates,

Small businesses created over 70 percent of net new jobs since 2019. In the previous business cycle, small businesses created 64 percent of net new jobs.

Small business optimism is rebounding as inflation falls. Multiple measures of business optimism show substantial increases in recent months. More than 70 percent of small business leaders expect revenues to grow over the next year, the most since the pandemic.

Entrepreneurship continues to surge: the United States is averaging 430,000 new business applications per month in 2024, 50 percent more than in 2019. The subset of applications for businesses most likely to hire employees has also risen to 140,000 per month, 30 percent more than in 2019. Over 19 million businesses have been formed since Biden’s inauguration, and these are not just sole proprietorships or fly-by-night operations. The subset of applications for businesses most likely to hire employees has increased 30 percent from 2019.

The Main Street Alliance(MSA) establishes priorities for small businesses. Its 2025 agenda does not include a suggestion for a tax deduction.  The Alliance advocates for “stronger antitrust enforcement, fair tax policies, and expanded access to capital. This includes efforts to revise the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, support the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice Antitrust Division, and fight against cuts to critical small business funding from the Small Business Administration (SBA) and other agencies.”

MSA “plans on supporting the continued implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, paid family and medical leave, investments in child care, and enhanced subsidies for health insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.”

Child Tax Credit

Kamala Harris’ economic plans include a $6,000 tax credit for parents of newborns and a continuation of the pandemic-era Child Tax Credit (CTC). The latter expanded the Child Tax Credits and boosted the benefit to $3,600 for children under six years old and to $3,000 for children from 7 to 17 years of age.

Seems beneficial to subsidize those in need, which are usually growing families. In addition, it is good economics — places funds in hands of those who will spend them for essentials and move them through the economy. The question that Harris has not answered is, “To what level of income will the credits apply?” My recommendation is that credits should also be based on assets and slide off gradually from $60,000 income to $100,000 income. Their effects on inflation need study.

Corporate Tax Rate

Before Trump lowered the maximum corporate tax rate to a flat 21 percent, the 35 percent rate for income greater than $18.3 million, had been relatively constant for 32 years, and economic gyrations had not shown to be due to that rate.

The effective corporate tax rate graph tells another story — corporations have taken advantage of tax breaks and loopholes to reduce their taxes.

The problem is not high corporate tax; the problem is the ability of corporations to avoid paying taxes. If tax breaks and loopholes unique to U.S. corporations, such as accelerated depreciation, using excess tax benefits from stock options to reduce federal and state taxes, and industry specific tax breaks were reduced or eliminated, then the tax rate could also be reduced; the government charges with one legislation and discharges with another legislation. Corporations are responsible for finding loopholes to avoid taxes, and the government is responsible for providing the loopholes.

The posed advantages of a lower corporate tax rate — increased funds for investment translating into increased production, which increases employment and Gross Domestic Product might be true if corporations used the greater part of their profit for increased investment. However, corporations have used the excessive profit for executive bonuses, for stock buybacks, for corporate takeovers, and for augmenting retained earnings. With corporate profits at all-time highs, “S&P 500 Q1 2024 buybacks were $236.8 billion, up 8.1% from Q4 2023’s $219.1 billion and up 9.9% from Q1 2023’s $215.5 billion.”

Left out of the corporate books is responsibility to support infrastructure – transportation, communication, utilities – government research, government loans, credit guarantees, bailouts, assistance to education, job training, subsidies, and other programs that benefit corporations. Shouldn’t corporations repay a fair share of the financial assistance that guarantees their prosperity?

The oft-quoted assertion that high tax rates have been the primary driver for corporations to move facilities to nations that have low tax rates is not proven. Manufacturing close to market and utilization of low labor rates have been the more prominent drivers. Commentators spuriously define the words tax havens, tax deferred, and tax inversions to confuse the public, and promote the mistaken belief that U.S. corporations can change their domicile and easily escape major payments of the corporation’s federal taxes on income earned outside the United States.

Corporations, whose sales contain much intellectual property (Microsoft), are able to shift certain profits on sales, but this cannot easily occur for profits earned from trade or business of defined products manufactured outside the United States. If repatriated, these profits are eventually subjected to U.S. taxes.

The key proposition, which is overlooked,  is that government spends all of corporate taxes and all the money circulates in the economy, some invested, some increasing production, some increasing employment, and all adding to or maintaining GDP.  Why is this proposition “the key proposition?”

Economics becomes simplified when it is realized that all money is debt. The money supply can only be increased by either banks’ lending money from Reserves and essentially creating money, or by the Federal Reserve engaging in Open Market Operations ─ purchasing government debt that is financed by the Treasury Department. Treasury prints money that appear as IOUs at the Federal Reserve.  If money remains dormant as excessive retained earnings or circulates speculatively as stock buybacks,  the money, which is debt is not wisely used; it is comparable  to borrowing money at 6 percent and then, rather than purchasing a product, investing it at 3 percent. All money in the economy is debt and all the debt is paying interest and being constantly retired and renewed.

This last tidbit is, admittedly, controversial and needs more discussion. It is the essential of the capitalist system, which grows by reinvesting profits ─ capital generating capital ─ and where all the money supply, including profits, that is needed to generate capital is equal to the debt in the system. Positive trade balances play a role, but generally, capitalism only moves forward by increasing debt.

Trump Tariffs

One mystery that has clouded the Biden administration is negligence in canceling the Trump administration’s tariffs on goods from China. During their debate, Trump questioned Harris on why, “if the Dems do not support the tariffs, has the Biden administration kept them?” Harris did not supply an answer.

Tariffs are used to either increase government revenue ─ the principal method before the income taxation system ─ or to protect domestic industries.

Former President Trump proudly declared that his tariffs had harmed the Chinese government. Is the function of a U.S. president to harm another government? He also claimed that foreign companies are paying for tariffs. “Multiple studies suggest this is not the case: the cost of tariffs have been borne almost entirely by American households and American firms, not foreign exporters.”

Protection is difficult to gauge; tariffs may have helped some producers and harmed companies who use the imported goods and now have to pay higher prices for the commodity. The export country, in this case, China, can retaliate and raise taxes on imports from the U.S. and harm American industries.

Have the tariffs protected the steel industry, the principal industry in the tariffs? The answer came in December 2023, when Nippon Steel announced a $14.9 billion takeover deal of U.S. Steel.

Conclusion

In conventional economic theory, the government formulates a budget and taxes the public to pay for the budget. If the tax revenues do not reach the expenditures, then either the government cuts the budget ─ done during Bill Clinton administration ─  or issues debt. What is never done is to have taxes planned to follow budget considerations. The promises by presidential contenders of cutting taxes are promises that have no rational; future budgets will be forced to be planned about tax revenue rather than having tax revenue agree with budget plans, a bad way to run a country.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

The questions ABC News‘ moderators asked in the September 10 presidential debate they hosted between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump could be faulted for not doing much to illuminate many of the issues important to voters. They did, however, ask some surprisingly pointed questions about perhaps the most important issue in this election—the preservation of democratic elections themselves.

And in sharp contrast to CNN, which hosted the debate between Trump and President Joe Biden in June, ABC‘s David Muir and Linsey Davis made at least some effort to offer real-time factchecking during the debate.

Economy & healthcare

Asked by ABC’s Linsey Davis if he had a healthcare plan, Donald Trump replied, “I have concepts of a plan. I’m not president right now.”

On the economy—which was identified, along with “the cost of living in this country,” as “the issue voters repeatedly say is their number one issue”—ABC‘s Muir asked only a handful of specific questions. He started out by asking Harris a question that he said Trump often asks his supporters, and which was famously asked by Ronald Reagan during a 1980 presidential debate: “When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?”

Aside from that rather open-ended query, the only specific questions ABC asked about the economy concerned tariffs, a favorite topic of Trump’s. Muir asked the former president whether “Americans can afford higher prices because of tariffs,” while he asked Harris to explain why “the Biden administration did keep a number of the Trump tariffs in place.” (The skepticism of both questions reflected corporate media’s traditional commitment to the ideology of “free trade.”)

The healthcare questions both candidates got from Davis were superficially similar—”Do you have a plan and can you tell us what it is?” to Trump, and “What is your plan today?” for Harris. But Trump’s question was set up by noting that “this is now your third time running for president,” and that last month, when asked if he now had a plan, he said, “We’re working on it.”

Davis prefaced her query to Harris by noting that “in 2017, you supported Bernie Sanders’ proposal to do away with private insurance and create a government-run healthcare system”—following the insurance industry-promoted terminology of “government-run” vs. “private,” rather than “public” vs. “corporate” (FAIR.org, 7/1/19).

Another question had the same theme of citing earlier, more progressive positions Harris had taken when running for president in 2019—on fracking, guns and immigration—and seemingly asking for reassurance that she had indeed changed her mind on these issues: “I know you say that your values have not changed. So then why have so many of your policy positions changed?” The line of question reflects corporate media’s preoccupation with making sure that Democrats in general and Harris in particular move to the right (FAIR.org, 7/26/24).

Abortion

Trump tells Kamala Harris that her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, supports “execution after birth.”

Addressing abortion, a motivating issue for many voters, Davis laid out Trump’s changing positions on abortion rights and an abortion ban, then posed the question:

Vice President Harris says that women shouldn’t trust you on the issue of abortion because you’ve changed your position so many times. Therefore, why should they trust you?

While both candidates frequently avoided giving concrete answers, Davis pressed Trump on his position, asking whether he would “veto a national abortion ban,” and again asking, “But if I could just get a yes or no”—helping to make his refusal to answer clear to viewers.

Perhaps in response to Trump’s claim that Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, supports “execution after birth,” Davis then asked Harris if she would “support any restrictions on a woman’s right to an abortion.” It’s a bit of a trick question without context, though. Many people say they oppose abortions later in pregnancy; media have long bought into the right-wing notion that “late-term” abortions are beyond the pale (Extra!, 7–8/07). But in practice, abortions later than 15 weeks are exceedingly rare and largely occur because of medical necessity or barriers to care (KFF, 2/21/24)—a nuanced reality that Davis’s question left little space for.

Immigration & race

Harris looks on as Trump claims, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats…. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Despite Trump’s repeated invocation of a border crisis and vilification of immigrants, ABC only asked him two immigration questions. One asked how he would achieve his plan to “deport 11 million undocumented immigrants”; the other followed up on Harris’s charge that Trump killed a border bill that, as Muir stated, “would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border.” Neither of the questions challenged Trump’s narrative of the “crisis” or the idea that further militarizing the border is necessary. (See FAIR.org, 6/2/23.) (ABC did counter Trump’s outrageous claim that immigrants were eating people’s pets.)

In his sole immigration question to Harris, Muir offered a right-wing framing:

We know that illegal border crossings reached a record high in the Biden administration. This past June, President Biden imposed tough new asylum restrictions. We know the numbers since then have dropped significantly. But my question to you tonight is why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?

The media, like Trump, regularly neglect to put immigration numbers in context. Border crossings have increased markedly under Biden, but so have deportations and expulsions, as Biden kept in place most of Trump’s draconian border policies (FAIR.org, 3/29/24).

And the suggestion that Biden “waited…to act” further paints a false picture of the Biden administration as not having “tough restrictions”—immigrant rights advocates called them “inhumane”—prior to 2024.

The one question introduced as being about “race and politics” addressed Trump’s race-baiting of Harris: “Why do you believe it’s appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of your opponent?”

Democracy

Recalling the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection, ABC‘s David Muir asks Donald Trump, “Is there anything you regret about what you did on that day?”

On the crucial issue of democratic rule, ABC did not pull many punches. To introduce his first question on the theme, Muir addressed Trump:

For three-and-a-half years after you lost the 2020 election, you repeatedly falsely claimed that you won, many times saying you won in a landslide. In the past couple of weeks, leading up to this debate, you have said, quote, you lost by a whisker, that you, quote, didn’t quite make it, that you came up a little bit short. Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020?

When Trump claimed he said those things sarcastically, and argued that there was “so much proof” that he had actually won in 2020, Muir challenged his claims directly, first noting, “I didn’t detect the sarcasm,” then continuing:

We should just point out as clarification, and you know this, you and your allies, 60 cases, in front of many judges….and [they] said there was no widespread fraud.

(Trump interrupted this factcheck with another lie, falsely declaring that “no judge looked at it.”)

Muir continued his pushback against Trump in his subsequent question to Harris:

You heard the president there tonight. He said he didn’t say that he lost by a whisker. So he still believes he did not lose the election that was won by President Biden and yourself.

Muir’s question to Harris highlighted Trump’s recent social media post declaring that those who allegedly “cheated” him out of victory would be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences.”

Harris was also asked to respond to Trump’s charge that his numerous prosecutions reflect a “weaponization of the Justice Department.”

International policy

Harris tells Trump that “the American people have a right to rely on a president who understands the significance of America’s role.”

ABC devoted the widest variety of specific questions to the topic of international policy—often with the implicitly hawkish perspective debate moderators tend to take (FAIR.org, 12/14/15, 2/11/20, 12/26/23). Muir set up his questions on Ukraine with a prelude that left little doubt what the right answers would be:

It has been the position of the Biden administration that we must defend Ukraine from Russia, from Vladimir Putin, to defend their sovereignty, their democracy, that it’s in America’s best interest to do so, arguing that if Putin wins he may be emboldened to move even further into other countries.

Muir then asked Trump, “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?”—evoking an aspiration for a military victory in the conflict that has seemed improbable at least since the failure of Kiev’s counteroffensive in the spring of 2023 (FAIR.org, 9/15/23). Failing to get the response he wanted, Muir reframed the issue as a matter of making America great: “Do you believe it’s in the US best interests for Ukraine to win this war? Yes or no?”

For her part, Harris was asked, “As commander in chief, if elected, how would you deal with Vladimir Putin, and would it be any different from what we’re seeing from President Biden?”—and also, in response to a false Trump claim, “Have you ever met Vladimir Putin?”

Muir asked about the end of the US’s 19-year occupation of Afghanistan—presented as a shameful moment, as he invoked “the soldiers who died in the chaotic withdrawal.” His questions to both Harris and Trump implicitly criticized their connection to the war’s end: “Do you believe you bear any responsibility in the way that withdrawal played out?,” Harris was asked, while Trump was asked to respond to Harris’s accusation that “you began the negotiations with the Taliban.”

ABC‘s moderators asked three questions about the Gaza crisis, which was framed as “the Israel/Hamas war and the hostages who are still being held, Americans among them,” though Muir went on to note that “an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead.”

Harris was asked how she would “break through the stalemate”—and also to respond to Trump’s charge that “you hate Israel.” Muir asked Trump how he would “negotiate with Netanyahu and also Hamas in order to get the hostages out and prevent the killing of more innocent civilians in Gaza.”

ABC asked one climate crisis question, addressed to both candidates. It took climate change as a fact and asked what the candidates would do to “fight” it. While not a particularly probing question—and disconnected from the debate’s discussions of fracking—it’s a slight improvement over previous presidential debates that have ignored the vital topic altogether (FAIR.org, 10/19/16, 9/22/20).

Factchecking

Muir points out to Trump that “the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

The presidential debate between Trump and then-candidate Biden was hosted in June by CNN, which made the remarkable decision to not attempt any factchecking during the live event (FAIR.org, 6/26/24). Post-debate factchecks turned up countless fabrications by Trump (and several by Biden), but that was entirely overwhelmed in the news coverage by pundits’ focus on Biden’s obvious stumbles.

ABC took a different tack, choosing to counter a few of Trump’s more noteworthy lies. Post-debate analysis counted at least 30 falsehoods from Trump and only a few from Harris; Muir and Davis called out Trump four times and Harris none.

Muir and Davis intervened on some of Trump’s most outlandish fictions. For instance, when Trump claimed that immigrants were “eating the pets of the people that live” in the communities they moved to, Muir noted that “there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

In addition to Muir’s pushback against Trump’s election fraud lies, Davis countered Trump’s insistence that Democrats support “executing” babies, drily noting that “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

ABC also challenged a Trump falsehood that many prominent media outlets continued to propagate long after it was no longer even remotely true (FAIR.org, 11/10/22, 7/25/24): that violent crime is “through the roof.” (As Muir pointed out, “The FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”)

Of course, the vast majority of Trump’s lies went unchecked, demonstrating the inherent failure of the debate format when one participant exhibits a flagrant disregard for honesty (FAIR.org, 10/9/20).

ABC did not explicitly correct any of Harris’s claims, in part because there was less misinformation in her rhetoric. Some of Harris’s more dubious statements were of the sort that are often found  in corporate media, such as her allusion to the claim that Covid originated from a Chinese lab, when she blamed President Xi Jinping for “not giving us transparency about the origins of Covid.” There is no more evidence for this than there is for immigrants eating pets in Ohio—but as it’s a media-approved conspiracy theory (FAIR.org, 10/6/20, 6/28/21, 7/3/24), one would not expect debate moderators to call her out on it.

Research assistance: Elsie Carson-Holt

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

A quote, wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln, reads:

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Well, that may be true but what is also true is that you can fool most of the people (followers of politicians, political parties, religions, celebrities, stars, social media influencers, businesspersons, and so on) most of the time because followers place blind trust in their heroes, heroines, religious leaders, influencers, etc.

This was visible during the quadrennial spectacles called Republican National Convention (July 15 to July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and Democratic National Convention (August 19 to August 22, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois).

Of course, there is a difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party: the Republicans are overtly hostile and will screw you unashamedly in broad day light without any kind of lubrication or apology.

The Democrats are, in that respect, a bit less rough. They’ll beg your pardon; would plead with you to understand the criticality of the situation; but will screw you, nonetheless — of course, in a dim light with a bit of lubricant.

Both the conventions took place during the ongoing Israeli slaughter, displacements, starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza since October 12, 2023. Both parties have supported the Israeli carnage. There is a division in the Democratic Party about supporting Israel, but the strong voices are few and many a times become victims of the Israel Lobby. One of the powerful group AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has spent more than $100 million in the 2024 election campaign: $15 million was spent to defeat US House Representatives Jamal Bowman who was critical of Israeli genocide of Gazans and $9 million to oust Cori Bush, another critic of Israeli war.

Danaka Katovich, National Co-Director CodePink, describes how a woman outside the convention center calling out the names of the children killed in Gaza was ignored and laughed at.

“There was a young woman that sat outside the exit of the Democratic National Convention on its third night reading the names of the children Israel has killed in the last ten months. She did it for hours, until her speaker battery died. She did it alone, taking care to pronounce every child’s name correctly and to say their age at the time of their murder. Without her, many of the DNC guests wouldn’t necessarily be confronted with the carnage members of their party is carrying out.

“Outside the gates of the DNC I saw a young woman making sure the children of Palestine weren’t just numbers, and I saw people laughing at her for doing so. They laughed loudly and mocked her voice. They mocked the names of the dead babies. They yelled at her to leave them alone. They left the coronation ceremony livid that they had to even hear about Gaza.”

Things were not too different inside the convention center, either.

The DNC allowed the parents of one of the hostages held by Hamas to speak and highlight their plight but no Palestinian was permitted to talk about the killing of over 41,000 [1] Palestinians (33% of them children and 18.4% women) and about ceasefire. Even a speech which included support for Kamala Harris was disallowed.

The speakers who did talk about Gaza and Palestine knew very well that their speeches were not going to make any difference.

AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez):

“She [Vice President Kamala Harris] is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.”

After five and a half years in the US Congress and as an active member of the Democratic Party, progressive AOC [2] knows damn well that no efforts on part of Kamala or Biden administration is needed to secure a ceasefire — the US just has to stop money and arms flow to Israel and that’s it.

On August 21, AOC posted on X:

“Just as we must honor the humanity of hostages, so too must we center the humanity of the 40,000 Palestinians killed under Israeli bombardment. To deny that story is to participate in the dehumanization of Palestinians. The @DNC must change course and affirm our shared humanity.

Bernie Sanders:

“We must end this horrific war in Gaza. Bring home the hostages and demand an immediate ceasefire.”

Two progressive members devoted a total of 31 words to the more than 10 month old continuing tragedy without mentioning the over 41,000 Palestinians killed!

Senator Raphael Warnock (Georgia) talked about children’s (including Gaza’s) safety.

“I need all of my neighbors’ children to be okay — poor inner-city children in Atlanta and poor children in Appalachia.” “I need the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza, I need Israelis and Palestinians, I need those in the Congo, those in Haiti, those in Ukraine. I need American children on both sides of the tracks to be OK. Because we are all God’s children.”

The speakers, including (Barack Obama), touched on various topics, but as Lorraine Ali in Los Angeles Times observed,

“But little was said about Gaza or Israel, and the silence spoke volumes. Let’s talk about everything but that war.”

When hawkish Harris opened her mouth she roared about defending the security of the most powerful and technologically advanced country, Israel, against the broken Palestinians.

“With respect to the war in Gaza, President Biden and I are working around the clock because now is the time to get a hostage deal and cease-fire done.

“Let me be clear: I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that the terrorist organization Hamas caused on Oct. 7.

“Including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival. At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again.

“The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war such that – Israel is secure – the hostages are released – the suffering in Gaza ends – and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity.”

Hamas of the Israeli occupied Gaza is a “terrorist organization” but there is no mention of who caused the loss of “so many innocent lives” or who is making “desperate, hungry people” flee for “safety, over and over again.”
No mention of Israel. This, from one who is the would-be next President of the US.

She said she and Biden are “working around the clock.” The clock must be out of order. The war will only stop when the US decides to halt its support.

Back in July, Netanyahu addressed the US Congress. Many Democrats abstained, Harris included. But then the very next day, she met Netanyahu in private. Her facial expressions didn’t show she was angry in any manner. Now look at Obama’s picture with Netanyahu where Obama’s displeasure is visible. Netanyahu was trying to undermine Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

The statement by Harris after her meeting with Netanyahu was the same diplomatic bullshit. [3]

The conventions are basically a feel good exercise to create excitement and hope among supporters and to denigrate and make fun of the opposition. The Democrats did exactly that; made fun of former president and the current Republican Party presidential candidate, Donald Trump and frightened, rightly so, their followers/die hard supporters with fascism replacing “democracy” if Trump gets reelected.

The Democrats, however, didn’t remind their supporters that they (the Democrats), when in power, do act in a fascist manner overseas with their wars, sanctions, embargoes, blockades, seizing money and gold belonging to countries they don’t like.

On domestic issues the Democrats and Republicans differ on certain issues but both support capitalism and get plenty of money from the corporations. The hands of both parties are drenched with blood of foreigners, including children and women. Even within the US, the Democrats are cruel with many segments of the society. Republicans are openly cruel.

Notes

[1] After every Israeli deadly crime, the usual statement, actually a warning, from its major supporter, the United States, is,

“We are engaged in intense diplomacy pretty much around the clock, with a very simple message: All parties must refrain from escalation.”

That is, Israel’s murderous act should remain unpunished or else we’ll jump in to defend Israel. The above warning was for Iran to refrain from any retaliation against Israel which had assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had also ordered killing of Lebanese militia group Hezbollah’s commander Fuad Shukr.

[2] The Democratic leadership was using one of their presidents’ tactic by inviting AOC to speak and thus mainstreaming her but also blunting her voice. President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908 – 1973) said the following about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

“It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

[3] A couple of paragraphs from Harris’ statement;

“I also expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians.  And I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there, with over 2 million people facing high levels of food insecurity and half a million people facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity.

“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating — the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time.  We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies.  We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering.  And I will not be silent.”

Lip service completed, let the one-sided hostilities continue …

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by B.R. Gowani.

Grandnieces explained how to pronounce her first name and an assortment of previous well-respected Democrat luminaries detailed why they love and we should love candidate Harris. Finally, the real-life Kamala Harris took the stage, eloquently traced the course of her life and outlined her recommended policies, including the awaited “ticking bomb” that has divided the Democratic Party  ─ handling of the Middle East crisis. Did the real Kamala Harris stand up?

To the eager Democrats, more from being influenced by the engineered media than what they saw, Kamala Harris was convincing, presenting herself as a patriotic and  dedicated American, fighting  for people’s rights, and demonstrating ability to handle the previously mentioned critical issue facing the Democratic Party ─ the Middle East crisis. Driven by the manipulated euphoria, the followers of the Democratic Party ruled that the real Kamala Harris stood up.

A surface phenomena!

Kamala Harris did not have to express herself with the narratives that she used. Her presentation reinforced the reasons that guide those who have been driven to the Trump candidacy — Democratic support for NATO  and foreign wars, liberal hypocrisy, promotion of the military-industrial complex, interference in other nations, and claiming  the moral high ground. Candidate Harris may have harmed her candidacy. Parse the words.

Before a delegation, chanting Trump rhetoric of “USA, USA, USA,” VP Harris said, “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself. Because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.”

U.S. foreign policy defends its global hegemony — economic, cultural, and militarist — against perceived opponents in China and Russia. Harris’ dialogue prompted many questions:

Why does Israel deserve unique attention? How does Israel fit in with U.S. objectives and U.S. worldwide conflicts any more than Egypt?
Why does a president seeker single out support for a nation, which, if it disappeared, would not change U.S. life, U.S. global strategy, or U.S. direction by one monkey tail?
Why defend apartheid Israel in its theft of Palestinian lands, dehumanizing  the Palestinian people, and murdering their children?
Where are the adversaries that Israel must defend itself against? Are they Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, who have no offensive capabilities, and  — no air force, no tanks, no navies and no desire to be vanquished? [Iran has an aged and minor air force, but it has a navy and hypersonic missiles; some military analysts consider that Hezbollah defeated Israel — DV ed]

By some weird (favored word these days) thinking, adopting Israel’s problems as America’s problems is an ordinary consideration. Israel’s adversaries are immediately America’s adversaries. Problems that the U.S. has with China and Russia receive no attention in Israel; hey, Russia and China are two of Israel’s favored partners.

If Kamala Harris does not want “the people of Israel to again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival,” shouldn’t she warn Israel that it is preferable that a terrorist organization called Zionism does not inflict upon the people of Palestine the horrors it has caused them for 75 years, including unspeakable violence against the population and massacres of infants? Unlike Israel, which has killed many American civilians and service people (USS Liberty), Hamas has not done any damage to Americans and, from an American perspective, cannot be  designated a terrorist organization, no more that the U.S., who committed several atrocities in Vietnam and Iraq, can be labelled a terrorist organization.

Reading a document scripted by AIPAC, became evident by the additional Harris comment, “At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”

This is the usual and cunning  Zionist practice of presenting everything with the “good guy” and “bad guy” balanced approach. Keep up the hopes. Don’t be concerned that Israel is favored, there are also elements who realize that “what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating.” Note that Harris delineates Hamas committing devastation upon Israelis, but makes no mention of who caused the devastation in Gaza and uses “many innocent lives lost,” rather than “innocent people murdered.” Who promoted “desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again, and who induced “the scale of suffering that is heartbreaking.” The culprit Israel is never mentioned.

For the umpteenth time, we hear, “With respect to the war in Gaza, President Biden and I are working around the clock because now is the time to get a hostage deal and cease-fire done,” and “President Biden and I are working to end this war, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.” Mention of Palestinians’ “right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination” has been an annual ritual and Democrat’s doctrine for decades. The “time to get a hostage deal and cease-fire done” was nine months ago, before tens of thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered and almost all of them were several times displaced.

The heir to Anthony Blinken, the most incapable Secretary of State in all U.S. history, will probably be saying the same in year 2030, except for replacing the words “Palestinian people,” with the words, “the  ten surviving Palestinians.”

By some weird (favored word these days) thinking, the convention invited the parents of a Zionist American, who was captured by Hamas, to plead for his release. The parents stated he had migrated to Israel to be with his people. Let’s place this in perspective.

This is a person who grew up in the United States, received his education and training in the United States, speaks English. and identifies with American culture.  He has no identification with Israelis, who speak Hebrew, eat different foods, and have a different history and culture. Does he share much with a Moroccan or Tunisian Jew? Are these his people? Isn’t he American?

This person deserted the nation that nurtured him and, for no adequate reason, assisted a despotic nation in its genocide of the Palestinians. The Americans of Palestinian descent, murdered, harassed, and detained by Israel received no attention.

VP Harris continued her pandering to the military-industrial complex with the brilliant remarks, “And know this: I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists,” followed with, “Trump, on the other hand, threatened to abandon NATO. He encouraged Putin to invade our allies, he said Russia could “do whatever the hell they want… as President, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.”

In the 2016 election, a major part of the American electorate rejected the conventional wisdoms of using NATO for offensive purposes, enhancing the military-industrial complex, and waging constant wars. In 2024, eight years later, the Dems still do not realize why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election.

All that Kamala Harris said could have been iterated in a more politically preferred manner — stopping wars rather than helping others in wars, ending the Middle East strife rather than assisting in genocide, finding ways to gain Iran and DPRK friendships rather than threatening them, striving to reduce conflict rather than strengthening NATO.

Moving voters away from the Democratic Party emerged from a hypocritical statement, “…to be clear, my entire career, I’ve only had one client: the people.” If so, why did Harris pander to one class, the middle class, by offering, “Well, instead of a Trump tax hike, we will pass a middle-class tax cut that will benefit more than 100 million Americans.”

Tax cuts are controversial and usually occur during times of recessions. Is Harris saying that the present tax rates, which are the lowest since World War II, are still not sufficiently low, and that the Biden administration ignored the middle class and will make amends? Is it wise to cut taxes and increase consumer demand during an inflationary period? This suggested tax cut is a disaster for the American economy. Not wanting to drift this article too far from its central issue, I’ll defer discussion of the proposed tax cut for another article.

Number one issue

There are a multitude of reasons that the U.S. participation in the genocide of the Palestinian people is the number one issue in the U.S. today and, unless that issue is justly satisfied, it does not matter who gets elected.  Supporting the genocide,

• Turns the Declaration of Independence and Constitution into words on paper, which are used to benefit an elite and cajole the masses.
• Reduces democracy, human rights, freedom, justice, and right to self-determination to farce.
• Intensifies the divisions that have already polarized America.
• Drives many Americans to despair, unable to comprehend how an obvious genocide by an obvious tyrant is supported and permitted. The American government and its mass of citizens exhibit insensitivity to the genocide, insensibility to the forces driving it, lack of concern for the Palestinian people, and have bewildered the knowing America.
• Betrays American sacrifices in World War II, where the U.S. fought against a tyranny and now supports its almost identical lookalike.
• Ratifies the use of those killed in Nazi labor camps to justify the mass killings of innocent Palestinians.
• Increases resentment to Jews and reinforces charges that Jews manipulate power and control media and courts. I know people who now refuse to socialize with Jews unless they are assured these Jews are not pro-Israel.
• Disturbs American youth who cannot understand how a legitimate and necessary protest against genocide becomes charged as an anti-Semitic diatribe and their pleas for human tights turns them into anti-Semites.

Many of us have become ashamed of being Jews. Must we now become ashamed of being Americans?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

August proved to be the second busiest month for US arms deliveries to Israel’s Nevatim Airbase since the October 2023 attacks by Hamas.  This has taken place alongside an increased concentration of US forces in the region since Israel’s assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh at the end of last month.  Two aircraft carriers, a guided missile submarine, and deployments of advanced F-22 stealth aircraft in Qatar, have featured in a show intended to deter Tehran from any retaliatory strikes.

After examining open-source aviation data from the end of July, Haaretz concluded that the issue of delayed shipments of US weapons had “been solved.”  Dozens of flights by US military transport planes, along with civilian and military Israeli cargo planes, mostly from Qatar and the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, had been noted.  Demands by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his July 24 speech to Congress that US military aid be “dramatically” expedited to “end the war in Gaza and help prevent a broader war in the Middle East”, had been heeded.

On August 26, Israel received its 500th aerial shipment of weapons and military supplies from the United States since the latest war’s commencement.  The 500 flights have also been supplemented by 107 sea shipments, altogether facilitating the transfer of 50,000 tons of military equipment in an initiative between the US military, Israel’s Defence Ministry’s Directorate of Production and Procurement and Mission to the United States, the IDF’s planning Directorate and the Israeli Air Force.

During the same month, the Democratic National Convention, which saw no debate about the candidature of Kamala Harris as its choice for presidential candidate, had tepidly promised some agitation on continued arms to Israel.  Ahead of the event, the Uncommitted movement’s 30 delegates, picked by voters alarmed by US support for Israel’s war machine in Gaza, were hoping to convince the 4,000 pledged delegates Harris had captured to add an arms embargo to its campaign in order to induce a ceasefire.

A petition by the group sought two outcomes: the adding of language to both the party and campaign platform “that unequivocally supports a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and a cessation of supplying weapons for Israel’s assault and occupation against Palestinians.”

These wishes proved much too salty for the apparatchiks and party managers.  The Democratic Party’s 2024 national platform ironically enough begins with an effusive “land acknowledgment” to “the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations” but plays it safe regarding an ally very much the product of territorial seizure, violence and occupation.  Despite mutterings in the party room about a split between moderate and progressive members on Israel’s conduct of the war, the topic of a ceasefire never made it to the committee hearings when the document was drafted.

In firmly insisting on continued US support for Israel in its war against Hamas, much is made in the platform about US efforts to forge a way that will see a release of the hostages, “a durable ceasefire”, the easing of “humanitarian suffering in Gaza” and the “possible normalization between Israel and key Arab states, together with meaningful progress and a political horizon for the Palestinian people.”  The language is instructive: the Palestinians are objects of pitiful charity, at the mercy of Israel, the US, and various Arab states.  Like toddlers, they are to be managed, steered, guided, their political choices forever mediated through the wishes of other powers.

With Israel remaining Washington’s paramount ally in the Middle East, that process of steering and managing the unruly Palestinians has been, thus far, lethal.  During her first interview given after the convention (she has an aversion to them), Harris scotched any suggestions on going wobbly on Israel.  “I’m unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defence and its ability to defend itself, and that’s not going to change,” she told CNN’s Dana Bush.  In what has become a standard refrain, Harris lamented that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” while acknowledging Israel’s right to self-defence.

When asked whether she would alter President Biden’s policy on furnishing military assistance to Israel, “No” came the reply.  “We have to get a deal done. The war must end, and we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out.  I’ve met with the families of the American hostages.  Let’s get the hostages out.  Let’s get the ceasefire done.”

This middle-management lingo says much about Harris’s worldview; in wishing to “get the ceasefire done”, she is encouraging a range of factors that will make sure nothing of the sort will be achieved.  The Netanyahu formula has worked its usual black magic.  Hence, the lack of an arms embargo, and the continued, generous supply to the IDF from their largest military benefactor.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

A couple of weeks ago, I plunged into Lake Michigan. Unlike usual, the water felt warm. It was easy to run all the way in and easy to float over the waves. Montrose beach was crowded with families, pitching tents to keep out of the sun. Children played, laughed, and cried. Midwesterners who still hadn’t made it out into the sun crisped their pale shoulders. It would have been a perfectly relaxing day, but fighter jets circled above everyone’s heads — doing dives and turning every which way. Mothers plugged their children’s ears and I saw a baby wearing noise canceling headphones.

It was the Air and Water show — an annual proud display of American military capabilities. They are the same jets that fly over the shores of Gaza, dropping bombs on families. That’s what I thought about — it was just by happenstance that we were there watching these planes as a performance rather than in Gaza as a weapon of mass slaughter. The more places I travel to, the more I realize how much the world looks the same. People everywhere are really kind and generous — the only thing that separates us is if the stars align to have us born under the boot of the United States or not.

As the jets flew over our heads I felt my stomach sour. In two weeks, the Democratic National Convention would come to Chicago and it was a present opportunity to make clear the contradictions that kept me up at night. Once months and months away, the DNC was finally around the corner.

This week, members of the Democratic Party came from all parts of the country to convene in Chicago. They were coronating Kamala Harris as their presidential nominee, a woman no one really voted for. Even in the face of this blatant lack of democracy, the party members were elated to choose her. They carried signs with her husband’s name and applause erupted from the tens of thousands of people in the United Center when she declared that the United States would have the “most lethal military” in the world under her leadership. To the people well aware of the millions of people the United States killed in the last twenty years alone, her statement was a threat.

The week was marked by the obvious gaps between the people going into the United Center and the people outside of it.

There was a young woman that sat outside the exit of the Democratic National Convention on its third night reading the names of the children Israel has killed in the last ten months. She did it for hours, until her speaker battery died. She did it alone, taking care to pronounce every child’s name correctly and to say their age at the time of their murder. Without her, many of the DNC guests wouldn’t necessarily be confronted with the carnage members of their party is carrying out.

Outside the gates of the DNC I saw a young woman making sure the children of Palestine weren’t just numbers, and I saw people laughing at her for doing so. They laughed loudly and mocked her voice. They mocked the names of the dead babies. They yelled at her to leave them alone. They left the coronation ceremony livid that they had to even hear about Gaza.

That night was demoralizing, and it’s something I will remember for the rest of my life.

Democrats laugh at the names of dead children. They openly refuse to let a Palestinian speak for two minutes at their four day long event. They order riot cops on people protesting a genocide. They have their parties, fundraisers, and happy hours while bodies pile up. If they really didn’t think the genocide was so bad, they wouldn’t get so mad at us for reminding them. They knew that the people they were rallying behind are cheering on mass slaughter — they’ve just weighed their fun, their careers, and their vanity against the lives of 180,000 Palestinians and decided that nothing could be more important than themselves. I don’t care what they said to me, or my friends, but I hope our faces and our presence made them feel even an ounce of discomfort. In the best case scenario, I hope they went to sleep hearing the echoes of the martyrs’ names. I still foolishly hope they turn a corner at some point.

There’s a lot to be said about the Democratic National Convention. It happened in the city with the largest Palestinian population in the United States. Plenty of our neighbors here have lost dozens and dozens of their immediate and extended families and Kamala Harris took to the stage to promise her ironclad support to their executioners. Riot cops filed into the streets, prepared to use the kettling tactics they used from the Israeli military. All of a sudden, the place I call home felt unrecognizable. The air of the coronation felt heavy — it didn’t feel like home. There were points where I was with thousands of other people, chanting in unison, but still felt so lonely. Luxury SUVs carried important people into important buildings for important events. And between us and the importance, there were police with rifles strapped to their chests.

But there were also good people. Like the girl outside the convention. And the thousand of people that marched with us. And the Shake Shack worker that joined us because he had 15 minutes before his shift started. And the security that had to kick us out to keep their job but told us how much what we were doing meant to them.

In the lead up to the DNC, we spent so much time thinking about the last DNC that happened here in 1968. Protests against the Vietnam war took to the streets in small numbers, demanding an end to the war. They were met with horrible police brutality, and mass arrests with long legal battles in their wake. Our mentors from ‘68 urged us not to be nostalgic for those days. I still admire them for going face to face with the Chicago riot cops, but I’ve also taken their reflections of ‘68 very seriously — they didn’t end the war on Vietnam. Many of them feel like they could have focused more on building a sustainable movement that people could join for the long haul. The 2024 DNC in Chicago presented us a unique opportunity — we had to take this huge moment of mass mobilization and make sure our efforts and organization doesn’t get washed away when all the balloons on the United Center floor are popped, and the important people fly out of O’Hare. When the dust settles and the most powerful people in the world leave our city, how will we keep fighting? I was happy when so many people asked us what was next, because it meant we were thinking long term.

In our own discourses on the left, the week was consumed by the discussion of tactics – what works and what doesn’t. An organizer I know reminded us about our responsibility to be a movement people want to join. There are plenty of people who are sympathetic to our cause but haven’t figured out how to be part of it. There’s millions of people without a movement home. Our cause is already popular, it’s already growing every day. Are we doing what we can to make sure people know where to go? Are we keeping our eyes on the prize or are we getting so wrapped up in nostalgia that we can’t see what we will be capable of a year from now if we move strategically? We are nothing without the people. Our responsibility is to the people —not to our egos, not to our careers, not to the vanity of our organizations, and not to our impulses. As a movement we generally have to be better at unlearning instant gratification and also embracing a diversity of tactics. But that’s something for another day.

It is easy to stand on a police line. It’s easy to yell at politicians. It’s easy to say things and do things by yourself. It’s hard to organize your neighbors and talk to new people about things they don’t immediately understand — my hope comes from the idea that once we get really good at that, the light at the end of the tunnel will be as clear as day.

Chicagoans are loud, principled, and good people and because of that there  are 2.6 million reasons to love this city. For a few days Chicagoans made certain democrats couldn’t walk around our city without seeing and hearing about the people of Gaza. It’s my hope that we see that as a small success, and also my hope that we saw the week of mobilizations as a jumping off point for building the world we want to see.

Lake Michigan is connected to the ocean through narrow waterways along the northern border of the United States, and someone mentioned at a protest that it’s not unfathomable that the waves crashing onto the shores of Gaza were once here in Chicago, and vice versa. Even if we don’t have skies that are absent of fighter jets in my lifetime, every second spent moving us towards that kind of life was worth it. As long as we don’t throw in the towel, we are closer than ever to that reality.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Danaka Katovich.

An Orwellian disconnect haunts the 2024 Democratic National Convention. In the isolation of the convention hall, shielded from the outside world behind thousands of armed police, few of the delegates seem to realize that their country is on the brink of direct involvement in major wars with Russia and Iran, either of which could escalate into World War III.

Inside the hall, the mass slaughter in the Middle East and Ukraine are treated only as troublesome “issues,” which “the greatest military in the history of the world” can surely deal with. Delegates who unfurled a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel” during Biden’s speech on Monday night were quickly accosted by DNC officials, who instructed other delegates to use “We Joe” signs to hide the banner from view.

In the real world, the most explosive flashpoint right now is the Middle East, where U.S. weapons and Israeli troops are slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly children and families, at the bidding of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, in July, Democrats and Republicans leapt to their feet in 23 standing ovations to applaud Netanyahu’s warmongering speech to a joint session of Congress.

In the week before the DNC started, the Biden administration announced its approval for the sale of $20 billion in weapons to Israel, which would lock the US into a relationship with the Israeli military for years to come.

Netanyahu’s determination to keep killing without restraint in Gaza, and Biden and Congress’s willingness to keep supplying him with weapons to do so, always risked exploding into a wider war, but the crisis has reached a new climax. Since Israel has failed to kill or expel the Palestinians from Gaza, it is now trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, a war to degrade Israel’s enemies and restore the illusion of military superiority that it has squandered in Gaza.

To achieve its goal of triggering a wider war, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander, in Beirut, and Hamas’s political leader and chief ceasefire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Iran has vowed to respond militarily to the assassinations, but Iran’s leaders are in a difficult position. They do not want a war with Israel and the United States, and they have acted with restraint throughout the massacre in Gaza. But failing to respond strongly to these assassinations would encourage Israel to conduct further attacks on Iran and its allies.
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The assassinations in Beirut and Tehran were clearly designed to elicit a response from Iran and Hezbollah that would draw the U.S. into the war. Could Iran find a way to strike Israel that would not provoke a U.S. response? Or, if Iran’s leaders believe that is impossible, will they decide that this is the moment to actually fight a seemingly unavoidable war with the U.S. and Israel?

This is an incredibly dangerous moment, but a ceasefire in Gaza would resolve the crisis. The U.S. has dispatched CIA Director William Burns, the only professional diplomat in Biden’s cabinet, to the Middle East for renewed ceasefire talks, and Iran is waiting to see the result of the talks before responding to the assassinations.

Burns is working with Qatari and Egyptian officials to come up with a revised ceasefire proposal that Israel and Hamas can both agree to. But Israel has always rejected any proposal for more than a temporary pause in its assault on Gaza, while Hamas will only agree to a real, permanent ceasefire. Could Biden have sent Burns just to stall, so that a new war wouldn’t spoil the Dems’ party in Chicago?

The United States has always had the option of halting weapons shipments to Israel to force it to agree to a permanent ceasefire. But it has refused to use that leverage, except for the suspension of a single shipment of 2,000 lb bombs in May, after it had already sent Israel 14,000 of those horrific weapons, which it uses to systematically smash living children and families into unidentifiable pieces of flesh and bone.

Meanwhile the war with Russia has also taken a new and dangerous turn, with Ukraine invading Russia’s Kursk region. Some analysts believe this is only a diversion before an even riskier Ukrainian assault on the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Ukraine’s leaders see the writing on the wall, and are increasingly ready to take any risk to improve their negotiating position before they are forced to sue for peace.

But Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russia, while applauded by much of the west, has actually made negotiations less likely. In fact, talks between Russia and Ukraine on energy issues were supposed to start in the coming weeks. The idea was that each side would agree not to target the other’s energy infrastructure, with the hope that this could lead to more comprehensive talks. But after Ukraine’s invasion toward Kursk, the Russians pulled out of what would have been the first direct talks since the early weeks of the Russian invasion.

President Zelenskyy remains in power three months after his term of office expired, and he is a great admirer of Israel. Will he take a page from Netanyahu’s playbook and do something so provocative that it will draw U.S. and NATO forces into the potentially nuclear war with Russia that Biden has promised to avoid?

A 2023 U.S. Army War College study found that even a non-nuclear war with Russia could result in as many U.S. casualties every two weeks as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did in two decades, and it concluded that such a war would require a return to conscription in the United States.

While Gaza and Eastern Ukraine burn in firestorms of American and Russian bombs and missiles, and the war in Sudan rages on unchecked, the whole planet is rocketing toward catastrophic temperature increases, ecosystem breakdown and mass extinctions. But the delegates in Chicago are in la-la land about U.S. responsibility for that crisis too.

Under the slick climate plan Obama sold to the world in Copenhagen and Paris, Americans’ per capita CO2 emissions are still double those of our Chinese, British and European neighbors, while U.S. oil and gas production have soared to all-time record highs.

The combined dangers of nuclear war and climate catastrophe have pushed the hands of the Doomsday Clock all the way to 90 seconds to midnight. But the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex. Behind the election-year focus on what the two parties disagree about, the corrupt policies they both agree on are the most dangerous of all.

President Biden recently claimed that he is “running the world.” No oligarchic American politician will confess to “running the world” to the brink of nuclear war and mass extinction, but tens of thousands of Americans marching in the streets of Chicago and millions more Americans who support them understand that that is what Biden, Trump and their cronies are doing.

The people inside the convention hall should shake themselves out of their complacency and start listening to the people in the streets. Therein lies the real hope, maybe the only hope, for America’s future.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

According to the New York Times, U.S. officials say there’s no excuse, on the warmakers’ own terms, for the genocide they are arming:

“Israel has achieved all that it can militarily in Gaza, according to senior American officials, who say continued bombings are only increasing risks to civilians while the possibility of further weakening Hamas has diminished…. William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, is due in Qatar on Thursday. Brett McGurk, President Biden’s Middle East coordinator, has headed to Egypt and Qatar. Amos Hochstein, a senior White House adviser, landed in Lebanon. One of the messages the officials are expected to deliver is that there is little more Israel can accomplish against Hamas.”

But there’s another message they’re delivering:

    the weapons will never stop flowing from the United States to Israel.

According to opinion polls, the majority of U.S. voters want the weapons shipments to stop now and have wanted that for some time.

But there’s another message many of them are delivering:

    OMG it’s so awesome how Kamala tells peace advocates to shut up, she and Walz bring joy to my life like like like like yeah you know?

If Harris were to demand that Biden or Congress or the UN stop the weapons shipments, and were they to stop, I would start campaigning for Harris-Walz to take office in Washington. As long as that doesn’t happen, I’ll support Biden-Harris taking seats in the dock at The Hague.

Unless of course somebody takes a notion to uphold U.S. laws and prosecute them here. Every weapons shipment violates the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, the Foreign Assistance Act, the Arms Export Control Act, the U.S. War Crimes Act, the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, and the Leahy Law. Just ask former Senator Leahy who says the U.S. government is making a mockery of the law that bears his name.

Biden is still scheduled to be officially president for about as long as the Gulf War took from start to finish, about twice as long as the Spanish-American war, about three times the Falklands war, several times various U.S. wars in Latin America and around the globe, and several times what it took for the U.S. to overthrow the government of Afghanistan prior to failing to grasp the need to leave that place for decades.

Biden’s remaining months are also longer than it has taken for polls to show dramatic turns of opinion against wars, commonly labeled “war fatigue” as though noticing the horror of the mass killing requires sleepiness rather than insight. But the “fatigue” has already been awakened.

Of course, politicians also hear messages from war-profiting bribers of their campaigns, and from weapons-funded stink-tankers. The war machine has a great deal of inertia even when it has no excuse. Peace making has been bizarrely redefined as “anti-Semitism.” Opposition to genocide is now “terrorism.” And all the microphones have been gathered up in a big pile and placed in front of corporations peddling that BS.

But too many people know better. Too many people grew up believing genocide was evil. We’ve been here before, and it didn’t work out well for the forever-war candidate. His losing worked out horribly for everyone, of course, but his winning would likely have done the same.

We need an election in which people insist on not voting for war. We need an election in which people develop too much self-respect to give a flying F-35 what kind of tacos a candidate eats, which candidate you’d like a beer with, which you’d hire as a babysitter, which you’d vote for as prom king or queen.

Why does the killing never end? Panem et circenses.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Swanson.

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

To a warmonger, every problem calls for a war.

WAR! WAR! FOREVER WAR! UNENDING WAR!

Our current leaders are hypnotized by war. They lack the vision and resourcefulness to consider negotiation and cooperation. Peace is not in their thoughts. ‘Peace’ is not in their vocabulary. They are addicted to war. They are obsessed with war.

The lesson we must take from this is this: Talking to them, trying to change their minds, trying to alter their policies and methods, is a complete waste of time. It’s like yelling at storm clouds and telling them to stop raining. It’s like telling a bumble bee it should get a pilot license. It’s like talking to a wall and expecting a reply.

Which means, there is only one sensible, rational, effective course of action …

Current U.S. leadership, at all levels — we’re probably looking at 99% of those now in positions of power — must be replaced.

This is the only possible way to stop U.S. aggression and wanton promotion of chaos and violence in the world.

This must be the entire focus of peace activism going forward. We have no choice in the matter. The record is clear — an unblemished record of total failure to stop, or even slow down, the war machine.

Make no mistake about it! Replacing these misfits, psychopaths, sociopaths, and enemies of peace now in power, will not be easy.

But it can — and must — be done!

Our survival as a nation, perhaps the survival of the entire human race is at stake!

Here’s what it will take.

The two major parties will not give us the choices we need to make. Both the Republicans and Democrats are in the pockets of the military-industrial complex. And to bolster their commitment to this vast money laundering enterprise, where hundreds of billions of dollars end up in the coffers of giant defense companies and ultimately into the bank accounts of the ultra-wealthy, both major parties are fanatically committed to making the U.S. an empire.

If we want peace, we will have to elect peace candidates. And to elect peace candidates, we must on our own initiative put peace candidates on the ballot.

Identifying and choosing alternatives to the pro-war establishment candidates will not be complicated. At least for now, here’s the litmus test, consisting of three questions to be put to prospective candidates:

If a candidate answers ‘yes’ to all three, he or she deserves our full support and our vote. We then do everything it takes to get this person on the ballot. There are three ways to get them on the ballot:

First option is to use primaries. That is, run them in the next primary against one of the major party candidates.

Second option is to run the candidates as “third party”, e.g. as a Green or Libertarian or other minor party candidate.

Third option is to put them on the ballot as an independent. Right now, this is what Dennis Kucinich is doing in Ohio’s 7th District.

Whatever strategy we adopt certainly will require some serious dedication and hard work. We’ll have to organize locally and talk to voters face-to-face, we’ll have to marshal all of the power of social media, we’ll have to badger local media for news coverage. We’ll have to organized rallies and bake sales, visit churches, convalescent homes, community clubs and organizations.

But recognize: this is democracy at its best! It is citizens, locally, community-by-community, working together to signal their priorities, put their values before the public, and introduce real choice at the polls.

Once peace candidates are on the ballot, then it’s up to the voting public. If we the people want to end the wars, reverse the rampant militarization of our society, if we truly want peace, then …

WE ONLY VOTE FOR PEACE CANDIDATES!

It’s that simple.

This is how we “fire” the warmongers who now populate the halls of Congress and other seats of power.

This is how we stop the squandering of our national wealth, the theft of our money!

This is how we inaugurate a nation at peace!

And guess what?

The whole world will thank us!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Rachel.

Vice President Kamala Harris in August 2021. (White House /Erin Scott)

Two college professors who studied and lived in the 1960s recently published an  opinion piece in The Los Angeles Times urging dissidents not to protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The first paragraph is a stark example of uber-liberals suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome:

A collection of fringe radical groups are calling for demonstrations in Chicago this August at the Democratic National Convention — a ‘March on the DNC’ for Palestine. We study political movements, and we’ve participated in more than a few ourselves. We share the concerns of many Americans about Israel’s actions in Gaza, the need for an immediate cease-fire and the release of hostages and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. But we’re not going to heed the call to protest in Chicago. We hope others will stay away as well.

Cheri Honkala, an advocate for decades for the poor and homeless in the streets of Philadelphia, plans to lead the Poor People’s Army in a march to the steps of the United Center on the convention’s opening day. If she is “radical fringe,” then so am I.

The tireless and fearless founder of Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Union in 1991, Honkala is now the Poor People’s Army’s national spokesperson and national coordinator of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign.

She has been arrested over 200 times, but says that her worst was at the July Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee where she tried to serve an arrest warrant on Trump and the Republican Party for crimes against humanity.

Police cuffed her, then drove her alone in a van to a closed prison where 200 military police officers sat at tables, ready to be of service to convention security on demand. They locked her in a room with glass walls for hours, then drove her to an empty warehouse district where they let her out at night in a thunder and lightning storm, with no wallet and no phone.

She is now preparing to confront the Democrats. Chicago was compelled to grant the Poor People’s Army a permit to march to the steps of the convention at Chicago’s United Center after failing to respond to her appeal of a permit denial. Authorities are now attempting to reroute the march, but the Poor People’s Army does not plan to back down.

The protests will address domestic crises as well as the genocide against Palestinians. Honkala talks about the reality of the streets, telling Black Agenda Report that:

More Americans have died because of the opiate crisis than died in the Vietnam War. Millions of dollars have come into Philadelphia, supposedly to help with recovery programs and housing and services here, but it never makes it to the people.

However, these learned professors of the 1960s writing in the LA Times assert that those preparing to protest must support the Democratic Party and its candidates because Donald Trump is a new Hitler who will end democracy. They say this is not the time for protest.

Malcom X Comes to Mind

But who determines when to be patient and ask for incremental change, and when to demand radical change?  At this point even national health care, closing Guantanamo, or increasing the national minimum wage to minimum subsistence, would be radical change. Malcom X comes to mind: “That’s not a chip on my shoulder. That’s your foot on my neck.” Sometimes, incrementalism doesn’t work.

Though the professors express “concern” about the genocide in Gaza, their piece speaks only of the Israeli hostages, not of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of them children, held without charges, sexually assaulted, and tortured. A Knesset member recently said that rape of Palestinian prisoners is legitimate.

October 7 happened in part because of all the Palestinians in prison with no charges or hope of a trial. The only ceasefire after October 7 brought Palestinian prisoners home at a 3:1 ratio to Israeli hostages but the ratio of remaining Palestinian prisoners to Israeli hostages is still far higher. Prisoner release will be part of any negotiation and must be one of the demands of the Palestinian solidarity movement.

Palestinian Youth Accord for Prisoners rally in Gaza support of Palestinian administrative detainees on a mass hunger strike, May 12, 2014. (Joe Catron, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

The professors say they support a two-state solution, but that dream is long dead; members of the U.N. Security Council and the General Assembly have repeated it like a mantra for decades as Israel colonized more land in the West Bank and rained bombs on Gaza. President Joe Biden and the U.S. State Department continue to invoke it but say that it can only be created by negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians, which is to say not at all.

October 7 happened because 75 years of negotiations failed. The recent Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh dimmed hopes of a negotiated settlement any time soon.

These men of the ’60s claim that “the convention protests of 1960 and 1964 followed a sophisticated and pragmatic strategy of working within and without the party apparatus.” But why would anyone trust their “within and without” strategy after the Democratic Party elite stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 and kept Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from running as a Democrat this year?

The long cover-up of Biden’s decline and his unceremonious replacement with Kamala Harris, a lock-em-up candidate who has never won a single delegate, reeks of Deep State. Many are asking, “Who is in charge, given the president’s obviously impaired faculties?”

Notice how Tony Blinken keeps addressing nation regarding all conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine over the last week?

Joe Biden is effectively AWOL & Kamala can’t be bothered to be questioned on what looks like could potentially be WWIII.

The U.S. gov is on autopilot pic.twitter.com/yZjBDXpfuX

— Duopoly Destroyer (@realnikohouse) August 6, 2024

While praise is showered on Biden’s alleged prowess in negotiating the recent historic and complicated international prisoner exchange, his incompetence was evident in the disastrous June 27 debate.  He confuses Haifa with Rafah, and Mexico with Egypt. There is no way he negotiated the prisoner exchange.

According to the LA Times editorialists, Chicago in 1960 and 1964 had good protesters who “worked within the party apparatus.”  The 1968 protesters, they say, were bad and “set back the cause.”  

The DNC protests are allegedly why Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, who continued the Vietnam War longer — they hypothesize — than Humphrey would have.  Of course, the anti-war candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, had probably just been assassinated by the Deep State, after winning the California primary, all but assuring his nomination. But rather than protest, we should have quietly urged an anti-war platform?

Humphrey promised to stop bombing North Vietnam and seek a ceasefire after the convention and before the election, because it was clear that the anti-war movement couldn’t be ignored. Would he have made those promises without the protests in Chicago? Would he have kept them if elected?  There is no way to know for sure.

As one who was on the streets protesting the Vietnam War, I knew that it was imperative to let the Vietnamese know we were in solidarity with them, and the Palestinians deserve no less. We must express our outrage at both parties for their support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Demonstration outside the The Watergate Hotel in Washington, where Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu was staying, July 22. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

“The key organizers,” the professors write:

the ones who will determine the message this protest conveys by its slogans and actions, are members of the ultra-leftist Party for Socialism and Liberation, and its front organization, the ANSWER coalition. This is the same group behind the demonstration that burned an American flag and defaced monuments in a ‘day of rage’ as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress last week.

If burning an American flag, a form of protest protected by the Supreme Court, and defacing monuments as acts of rage against war criminal Netanyahu make protestors “ultra-leftist,” then sign me up.

Rather than using labels like “ultra-leftist”, why not challenge what this group actually says, specifically and factually? The global stakes are quite high, so clarification and accuracy are essential.  The Poor People’s Army and Code Pink are also among the organizers. The protests are organized by a coalition of groups determined to challenge the Democrats in the streets over their position on Palestine. Let’s not bring back Red baiting.

According to the professors, “…the primary goal has to be to defeat Donald Trump, and to help Democratic candidates win in the House and Senate.”

They don’t want to lose voters “to a perception that Democrats are the party of chaos…” But it is past time to expose the chaos to the light of day. We would be immoral to stand passively by as the U.S. funds genocide in Palestine and plays a game of nuclear chicken with Russia in Ukraine.

Rather than conceding all political space to the Democratic Party’s coronation of Kamala Harris, we must expose how fundamentally undemocratic it is. They stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders twice, kept RFK Jr out of this year’s Democratic primary, then shoehorned Kamala Harris into place with the barest semblance of Democratic process; a bunch of no-name delegates quickly met and agreed to throw their support to her.

According to renowned journalist Seymour Hersch, Barack Obama threatened Biden with the 25th Amendment if he didn’t step down. It’s all about backroom deals and Deep State manipulations, while the rest of us wonder who’s really in charge. Yet the professors scoff at the notion that the Democratic Party is “a tool of billionaires and corporations.”  It’s not?

Insane story from Seymour Hersh…

Biden was threatened with the 25th Amendment by top level Democrats.

"Obama called Biden after breakfast [on July 21] and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment.’” pic.twitter.com/pxL27A7fhB

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) July 28, 2024

Ajamu Baraka recently wrote:

The fact that select oligarchs, in this case, the cabal that actually runs the Democrat Party, can remove a presidential nominee and expeditiously anoint Kamala Harris as his replacement cannot be characterized as anything else but a coup…The oppressed must have a clear and sober understanding of the class and power dynamics in the Democrat Party but also in the broader society. The gangster move by the oligarchs who control the Democrats stripped away any pretense that any real structures of democracy exist in that party.

People who went to Chicago in 1968 to protest the Vietnam War at the DNC were courageous and righteous. People planning to go to Chicago’s DNC this year to protest Democratic Party complicity in the ongoing Gaza genocide are also courageous and righteous.  Crash the party is a slogan of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.  Sign me up.  We need to get that foot off our necks.

• First published in Consortium News

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Riva Enteen.

Haven’t you heard? Democratic presumptive presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s decision to pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate was based in antisemitism. At least, that’s what the New York Times wants us to believe.

While Democrats of many stripes seemed thrilled with Walz, a Midwestern progressive with military service and a down-home attitude, the Times has kept up the fiction that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who made the short list of vice presidential hopefuls, didn’t get the nod because of left-wing antisemitism. The claim is a thinly veiled insinuation that Democrats who oppose the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Gaza—and Shapiro’s aggressive backing of Israel—are motivated by bigotry against Jews.

‘Veered past anti-Israel fervor’

By failing to choose Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, the New York Times‘ Jonathan Weisman (8/6/24) wrote, she passed up a chance to “mollify many Jewish voters and other centrists over a subject that has bedeviled the Biden-Harris administration for nearly a year, Israel’s war in Gaza.”

Jonathan Weisman came out in force in a piece (New York Times, 8/6/24) with the headline “Walz Instead of Shapiro Excites Left, but May Alienate Jewish Voters,” and the subhead, “Many Jewish organizations backed Harris’s pick for running mate, but beneath that public sentiment is unease over antisemitism on both the left and the right.”

Weisman wrote:

Was her decision to sidestep Mr. Shapiro, some wonder, overly deferential to progressive activists who many Jews believe have veered past anti-Israel fervor into anti-Jewish bigotry?

The reporter acknowledged that there were “scores of reasons” why Harris might have chosen someone other than Shapiro “that had nothing to do with the campaign that the pro-Palestinian left had been waging against him.” But he added, without citing evidence, that “Jews face a surge of antisemitic sentiment on the left,” and see the Democrats as “harboring strongly anti-Israel sentiment on their left flank.”

After noting that the Republican Party under former President Donald Trump’s influence has been rife with antisemitism, Weisman quoted Rabbi Moshe Hauer, the executive vice president for the Orthodox Union, saying “our greater worry right now is that antisemitism on the left seems to be far more influential on a major party than the antisemitism on the right.”

For anyone who needs a reminder, Weisman was demoted at the Times (8/13/19) when he suggested (“C’mon”) that congressmembers Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar are not really from the Midwest, despite representing Detroit and Minneapolis, respectively, any more than Atlanta’s Rep. John Lewis is from the Deep South, or Austin’s Rep. Lloyd Doggett is from Texas—Weisman’s apparent point being that being Muslim, Black or (in Doggett’s case) just liberal disqualifies you as being from such regions. It was just another example (FAIR.org, 8/14/19) of what the Atlantic (5/4/18) meant when it said of his book (((Semitism))), “His facts are wobbly and his prescriptions are thin.”

‘Plenty of upsides’

Before Harris made her choice, Weisman (New York Times (8/1/24) touted Shapiro as an “opportunity to stand up to her far-left flank in an appeal to the center of the party and to independents.”

This wasn’t Weisman’s only attempt to paint opposition to making Shapiro the Democratic running mate as a sign of Jew hatred. Before Harris’s choice was announced, Weisman wrote a piece (New York Times, 8/1/24) whose subhead said that Shapiro, “an observant Jew, is seen as bringing plenty of upsides to the Democratic ticket,” while “some worry about setting off opposition to the Democratic ticket from pro-Palestinian demonstrators.”

The false implication was that it was his religion that aroused concern from activists, rather than his record on Israel/Palestine. (The insinuation was even clearer in an online blurb the Times used to promote the piece: “Pro-Palestinian groups are seeking to block Gov. Josh Shapiro, an observant Jew, from becoming Kamala Harris’s running mate.”)

Shapiro has been strongly supportive of Israel throughout the Gaza crisis—“We’re praying for the Israelis and we stand firmly with them as they defend themselves as they have every right to do,” he announced early on (Harrisburg Patriot-News, 10/12/23), after Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had declared a “full siege” of Gaza, with “no electricity, no food, no fuel” (Washington Post, 10/9/23).

“We are fighting animals, and we will act accordingly,” Gallant declared. As Israel followed through on that promise, Shapiro was criticized for not speaking out against the soaring Palestinian death toll (New Lines, 8/3/24).

Shapiro assisted in the McCarthyite ousting of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, calling her congressional testimony about student protests a “failure of leadership,” and urging Penn’s trustees to hold her accountable (Wall Street Journal, 12/6/23). The governor later issued an order barring state employees from engaging in “scandalous or disgraceful” behavior—vague terms that were seen as a threat to free speech (Spotlight PA, 5/14/24).

Shapiro distinguished himself in his vituperation of pro-Palestine activists by comparing them to “people dressed up in KKK outfits” (Jacobin, 8/5/24). “I don’t know anybody who used the Ku Klux Klan when they talked about protesters,” Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told FAIR. “That’s going pretty far.”

When Shapiro was Pennsylvania’s attorney general, he “went after Ben and Jerry’s when the ice cream company decided to stop selling to Israeli settlements in the West Bank” (NBC, 7/31/24). He is a strong supporter of divestment, however—when it comes to Muslim countries. “We must use our economic power to isolate our enemies and strengthen our allies,” he said as he introduced a bill mandating that Pennsylvania state pension funds boycott companies that did business with Iran or Sudan (Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, 4/22/09).

Shapiro was also forced to “distance himself from a recently uncovered op-ed he wrote in college, in which he identified as a former volunteer in the IDF” (Times of Israel, 8/3/24). The op-ed argued that “peace between Arabs and Israelis is virtually impossible,” since “battle-minded” Palestinians “will not coexist peacefully” and “do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 8/2/24).

Another pre-VP announcement piece in the New York Times (8/2/24), by Jess Bidgood, acknowledged some of this background, but still put Shapiro’s religion before his policy, describing him as “an observant Jew who speaks of his faith often” before noting that

his outspoken support of Israel’s right to self-defense and his denunciation of college students’ protest of the war in Gaza have also drawn opposition from the left.

‘Not captive to the left’

Trump advisor Mark Penn (New York Times, 8/3/24) encouraged Harris to choose Shapiro not despite but because of the fact that he is “unpopular with many progressives over energy policy, school choice and other issues,” and therefore “would send a signal that Ms. Harris is not captive to the left and that she puts experience ahead of ideology.”

Weisman’s pre-announcement piece on Shapiro (8/1/24) contained this nugget:

The campaign to thwart his nomination is, by its own admission, not well organized. People working against Mr. Shapiro come from groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America; Uncommitted, which waged a campaign to convince Democratic primary voters to register protest votes against President Biden; the progressive Jewish group IfNotNow; and a group of anonymous pro-Palestinian aides on Capitol Hill known as Dear White Staffers. It does not include some of the largest Palestinian rights groups, nor have more prominent progressive groups joined, like Justice Democrats.

Which raises the question: If this coalition is so weak, why write about it? The Uncommitted campaign, which attracted nearly 1 million votes in the primaries, greatly worried Democrats who supported Biden (NBC, 3/6/24; Guardian, 7/3/24). Biden is now out of the race, and the influence of this coalition had enough impact to grab the concern of the Times.

In a New York Times op-ed (8/3/24) that pushed for Shapiro as the running mate, pollster Mark Penn—identified by his work with the Clintons from 1995 to 2008, not by his counseling Trump in 2019—said that Shapiro’s presence on the ticket

would also reassure Jewish voters—long a key part of winning Democratic voter coalitions—at a time when many of them see hostility and antisemitism coming from some in the far left of the party.

Penn’s op-ed made a flimsy case that concern for Palestinian life is “antisemitic.” But in hailing Shapiro as a moderate, Penn revealed it was his politics, not his identity, that gave the left pause. Shapiro is “unpopular with many progressives over energy policy, school choice and other issues,” Penn noted. This is a good thing, in Penn’s view; picking Shapiro as a running mate “would send a signal that Ms. Harris is not captive to the left and that she puts experience ahead of ideology.”

‘Won’t assuage concerns’

The New York Times Katie Glueck (8/6/24) depicted scrutiny of Shapiro’s Israel/Palestine positions as ” an ugly final phase of Ms. Harris’s search.”

Following Harris’s announcement of Walz as her running mate Times reporter Katie Glueck (8/6/24) wrote that

after the conclusion of a vice-presidential search process that prompted intense public scrutiny of his views on Israel, Mr. Shapiro’s familiar references to his religious background took on a raw new resonance.

“He seemed to sound a note of defiance” by saying “I am proud of my faith,” Glueck wrote.

Although his Mideast positions were “well within the Democratic mainstream, and were not markedly different from other vice-presidential candidates under consideration,” Glueck wrote, Shapiro “drew outsize attention on the subject, his supporters said, and some saw that focus as driven by antisemitism”—linking to Weisman’s piece about how the Walz choice might “alienate Jewish voters” as evidence.

In a particularly bewildering piece, Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn (8/6/24) chided that Walz “does relatively little to define or redefine Ms. Harris”: “He won’t assuage concerns that she’s too far to the left,” Cohn lamented; “his selection doesn’t signal that Ms. Harris intends to govern as a moderate”—which is, of course, the New York Times‘ constant concern about Democrats. No matter, wrote Cohn—”there will be many more opportunities” for Harris to move to the right, “like a policy platform rollout and the Democratic convention.”

‘Didn’t dare cross the left’

The Wall Street Journal (8/1/24) came out and said what New York Times writers mostly insinuated: Shapiro was “vilified and maligned because he is Jewish.”

The Murdoch press has painted Shapiro as a victim of antisemitism as well, although as outlets that practically equate the DNC with the USSR, it’s hard to see why they would care about the Harris campaign’s internal debates. “The attack on Mr. Shapiro is part of a far-left campaign to portray Jews as perpetrators or enablers of genocide,” Daniel Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in the Wall Street Journal (8/1/24). The New York Post editorial board (8/6/24) said that Shapiro was the “clear best choice” but Harris rejected him “plainly because she didn’t dare cross the left by tapping a Jew.”

At FAIR (6/6/18, 8/26/20, 12/12/23), we’ve grown used to establishment media like the New York Times conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism as a way to keep the struggle for Palestinian rights on the political margins. But with the paper’s laments for the unchosen Shapiro—so parallel to the Murdoch media’s crocodile tears—the reach feels so extreme one wonders if even the authors themselves believe it.

The Democratic Party boasts many Jewish lawmakers in both houses, including Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, a sort of mascot of New York Jewishness rivaling Mel Brooks. Shapiro wouldn’t have even been the first Jew on a Democratic presidential ticket; the late Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, similarly observant but far to Shapiro’s political right, has that distinction. The suggestion that without Shapiro on the presidential ticket, the Democrats remain some kind of goyish social club is comical. (If we accept that spouses are unofficial parts of presidential tickets, Harris if elected will also give the White House its first Jewish resident.)

Clearly, the Times does not believe that voters must simply accept Jewish candidates without looking at their records. It did not suggest that the party’s rejection of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, as a presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020 was rooted in disdain for his unabashed Brooklyn Jewishness. When New York City Comptroller Brad Lander challenges Mayor Eric Adams from the left in the 2025 city primaries, the paper is unlikely to suggest that voters who stick with the incumbent are Jew haters.

It’s becoming clear that for the corporate media, it is OK to not support Jewish candidates if they support lifting wages, fighting climate change or addressing racial injustice. But at a time when concern for Palestinian lives has become so mainstream that being too pro-Israel can become a political liability, the New York Times wants Jewish politicians’ support for Israel to be a taboo topic.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

I can’t really find the words to express how depressing it is to watch the life get sucked out of the anti-genocide movement in the United States because one of the candidates running for president this year happens to come from the administration that’s been overseeing said genocide.

Kamala Harris shouted down protesters against the US-backed incineration of Gaza during a campaign rally on Wednesday, responding to their chants of “we won’t vote for genocide” by telling them they’re helping Trump win.

The Hill reports:

Demonstrators in the crowd at Harris’s Detroit rally repeatedly shouted out as the vice president spoke to an airplane hangar packed with supporters, “Kamala, Kamala you can’t Hide, we won’t vote for genocide.” The crowd booed and drowned out the protesters with chants of “Kamala.”

“I’m here because we believe in democracy. Everyone’s voice matters, but I am speaking now. I am speaking now,” Harris said to applause.

As protesters continued to interrupt, Harris delivered a more blunt warning.

“You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win then say that. Otherwise I’m speaking,” she said.

The crowd thunderously applauded the comments from Harris. Social media is full of Democrats sharing the footage of the interaction and fawning over what a commanding girlboss she is.

Like I said. Depressing.

Shortly after Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Harris, I noted that we were “already seeing some strong ‘shut up shut up SHUT UP about Gaza’ energy from Kamala supporters toward those to their left,” and since that time this phenomenon has been growing steadily worse. Now we’ve got this freakish dynamic where criticizing an administration that is guilty of the crime of genocide will get people telling you “Hey, nobody’s perfect!” like it’s some petty little quibble.

And I can’t help watching all this and wondering what Aaron Bushnell would think. On February 25 Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington while screaming “Free Palestine” to draw attention to the horrors his country was helping to inflict upon the people of Gaza, and now the cause he gave his life for in the most agonizing way possible is being intentionally subverted by people who claim to care about justice and human rights. What would this look like to him?

If, before igniting the accelerant, Bushnell had been granted a vision of Harris silencing anti-genocide protesters to the applause of her followers months in the future, would he still have gone through with it? Or would he have cast his lighter aside and collapsed in a fit of despair while Gaza burns, like the rest of us are doing right now?

Five months. In a bit over five months we went from seeing an active-duty airman light himself on fire to turn America’s eyes toward Gaza, followed by a highly energized student protest movement against their country’s facilitation of genocidal war crimes, to seeing those student protests crushed with the approval of the current president, and then his would-be successor telling anti-genocide protesters to shut the fuck up and fall in line so that Democrats can win.

Every time a light gets sparked in the darkness, the empire scrambles to snuff it out. Which wouldn’t be so depressing if not for all the brainwashed masses falling all over themselves to help them do it.

Ah well. The fight goes on. Even if these pricks are going to set the whole world on fire, we can still at least try to make it difficult for them.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caitlin Johnstone.

Janine Jackson interviewed author and educator Tim Wise about ‘DEI hires’ for the August 2, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: While Republicans are clearly scrambling to find profitable lines of attack in a new presidential race, they’re deploying one line that draws on a lot of history: labeling presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris a “DEI hire,” with reference to programs designed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. The notion, if anyone needed it spelled out, is that any Black or brown person or woman in a job is only there because employers were forced to hire them.

To many, this sort of thing is transparent misogyny and racism, and then that special combination of the two. But being obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t impactful. And it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s built on decades of undermining any intentional efforts to dismantle or even acknowledge the living history of structurally embedded white supremacy in this country.

Tim Wise is an anti-racism educator, author and critical race theorist. He joins us now by phone from Nashville. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tim Wise.

Tim Wise: Thank you for having me.

JJ: One official definition of DEI is “organizational frameworks which seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have been historically underrepresented or subject to discrimination.” We might add that could be historically and currently, but that’s the idea.

Now, it used to be most everyone would say, “Sure, that’s a good idea,” but then maybe just not do it. Now, we seem to have slipped backward to where the right feels they can boldly say, “Oh, we don’t even support that idea.” It’s strange, isn’t it, to miss the good old days when people didn’t say what they thought?

Tim Wise: “When you’re used to hegemony, pluralism begins to feel like oppression.”

TW: Right—we’ve sort of gone from the days of the dog whistle to the air horn or bullhorn on these things. I remember, 30-plus years ago, when I started out doing this work in the campaigns against David Duke down in Louisiana. Duke felt the need to sort of hide his racism, to downplay his overt white supremacy.

And it seems like the gloves are off now. And so DEI has become essentially the new n-word for certain folks on social media. They will apply it to any person of color, regardless of that person’s qualifications, regardless of that person’s accomplishments. And they’ll apply it to public officials who, after all, pass the only test one needs to determine qualifications, which is, they got elected, right?

So if the mayor of Baltimore happens to be a Black man, and a barge hits a bridge and the bridge falls down, they call him the DEI mayor. What does that even mean? I mean, you get elected by getting votes, just like white mayors. And if the mayor had been white, I don’t think there would’ve been some special white man superpower that would’ve kept the bridge up.

But what that is is a way of reminding people, or telling people, these folks are less qualified, and they’re taking your stuff.

And I think the reason that they’ve ramped that up, and the gloves have come off, is that unlike 30-some odd years ago, 20 years ago, we suddenly have white folks confronted with a couple of realities. One is that the culture and the demographics of the country are changing, in a way that renders us less hegemonic than we once were. And when you’re used to hegemony, pluralism begins to feel like oppression. You feel like the wheels are coming off the bus. And so there’s this perfect storm of white anxiety that we are in the midst of, and we’re going to have to figure out how to respond to that.

JJ: And we’ll come back to that. Just doubling on what you’ve just said, folks may remember this 1990 ad for North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms that showed white hands crumbling a job- rejection letter with the voiceover, “You needed that job and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?”

“White Hands” ad for Jesse Helms (1990)

It’s powerful, in part, because of what it glides over. How does our dude know he was the best qualified? And then the implication that decades of rejecting minorities because they weren’t white represents the state of fairness that we’re trying to get back to. And, I was just going to say, even though these current campaigns are more overt, they’re still drawing a lot of power from what they don’t say. And why does that work? Who does that work on?

TW: I think it works because, first off, we have a long history of believing, No. 1, of course, that folks of color are less qualified, and whites are more qualified. That’s always been a problem in our country.

But I think there’s an even more fundamental thing at work, and that is, if you think about the most dominant ideological underpinning of America, what is it? The core of our belief system is this belief in meritocracy, rugged individualism, the idea that wherever you end up is all about you. So if you work hard, you can make it, anyone can.

And that’s, in theory, a race-neutral ideology, it’s also the secular gospel. If America were a Bible, it would be Genesis 1:1.

The problem is, once you imbibe that, once you internalize that belief, and you look around, and you see a society of profound racial inequality, of gender inequality, of class inequality, what is the logical thing for a person to do? And by a person, I don’t even mean an overt bigot. I mean an everyday average person who thinks about that, goes, “Gosh, if where you end up is all about your own effort and anyone can make it, then I guess these people on the bottom, maybe they are lesser, right? And the people on the top really are better.”

And so racism and sexism and classism can all be reinforced in people who are not actually particularly hateful, prejudiced or bigoted, but simply put two and two together: the idea of rugged individualism, and the objective reality of social stratification or inequality. So we really have to address that, because that suggests that a core element of American political thought is going to reinforce this kind of thinking. And once it does that, it can reinforce the very systems that promote that thinking.

X (3/15/21)

JJ: Republicans may have faith that they can just say “DEI” and their work is done, because of the success of other recent efforts. I will never get over how Christopher Rufo just called his shot. He just said:

The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

And news media, who were in a place to say, “Well, no, you can’t just take a term and say it doesn’t mean what it claims to, it means whatever you say it does”—they didn’t do that. They simply folded this intentional misrepresentation into the public dialogue. I feel like they got played like a fiddle, and for reasons. But it didn’t just allow, but promoted, the notion that these attacks were some organic bottom-up thing, rather than an orchestrated campaign. What do you see as the current or potential role of the press in this?

TW: I think the media have done a miserable job, as you suggest, in responding to the blatantly, transparently dishonest narrative that folks like Rufo are spinning, when he says, as he has on his Twitter thread—he’s amazingly transparent about this—that we’re basically going to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. We’re just going to name things what we want to name them. We’re going to tell people, this is what it is. We don’t even care.

He’s been quoted in a speech saying he doesn’t give a—and I know I can’t say the next word, because we’re on radio—about what CRT actually is. He doesn’t care about it. He, in fact, wants us to debate the specifics of it, while he just uses it as a propaganda cudgel.

Intercept (6/8/23)

And the media, rather than exposing that, have done piece after piece after piece, and I’m talking puff pieces, about Christopher Rufo, where they don’t dig into the funding, for example, the multi-billionaire dollar stuff that’s coming in for him and the organizations he works for.

This is not some grassroots, bottom-up campaign of some simple guy sitting at his computer in his home, taking on the powerful. This is somebody being funded by the powerful. But hardly any of the media have really attempted to pull back the veil on who he is and who is funding him and what their agenda is. And we know what their agenda is, because it’s the same agenda they’ve had for 50 years or more, really more than that, going back 60 years.

These are the ideological descendants of the people who never supported the civil rights movement, who never supported the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Civil Rights Act. They’re the ideological descendants of the folks who used to write, at the National Review, that Black folks basically weren’t ready for the right to vote. They weren’t civilized enough yet. That was the official position of Bill Buckley’s magazine back in the ’60s. So that’s who these folks are, and if the media really believed in investigative journalism, they would expose that.

JJ: And then the other line that bugged me was, “Well, they aren’t even teaching CRT in elementary school,” as if that was a pushback.

TW: Yeah, there was sort of a capitulation, right? This idea that liberals, rather than standing up and fighting the attacks, said, “Oh no, that’s not us, my goodness.” Because the implication is, “Well, thank God it’s not, I mean, thank goodness we don’t do CRT with children, that would be poisoning their minds.”

But all CRT tries to do, and this is so important for people to understand, is to provide a theoretical grounding so that when you look out and you see racial disparity, you have a framework and a lens for understanding it. And without a systemic lens, frankly, the only explanation left is the one the right prefers, which is, these Black and brown folks are broken. And CRT is saying, “No, it’s not Black and brown folks who are broken.”

It’s not necessarily that white people are bad. CRT doesn’t bash white people. That’s a great myth. CRT doesn’t really say anything about white people as people. It says something about white supremacy as a system, historically and contemporaneously. And if you don’t have that framework, I don’t know how you can make sense of the world around you, except by blaming the people on the bottom for being there.

JJ: Finally, you travel the country, and have for years, talking to people about these issues. What’s the vibe? Where do you find hope right now?

TW: I find hope in the young folks, disproportionately, who led the uprising, obviously, in 2020 in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. I find hope in the young people, disproportionately, who have stood up for the rights of Palestinians and the lives of Palestinians in this moment as well.

City Lights (2020)

I find hope in the enthusiasm that we’re seeing right now in the newly refashioned presidential race. I think there’s a lot of energy to realize that there is an opportunity to defeat Trumpism. There is an opportunity to beat back these folks who say they want to make America great again, by which they obviously mean a directional reference to the past.

I think there’s hope in knowing that the vast majority of the people in this country believe in democracy, want democracy, reject things like Project 2025, and want to move the country forward, rather than moving it backward where those folks want to go.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Tim Wise. The most recent book is Dispatches From the Race War, from City Lights. Tim Wise, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

TW: Oh, you bet. Thank you.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Caution, also, from any disturbance posed by overtly visible talent, which can be something of a handicap for higher office.  The Minnesota governor had certainly received attention from Harris for his less than profound suggestion that comments made by Republican contenders Donald Trump and J. D. Vance were “weird”.  In an interview with MSNBC, Walz declared that “These are weird people on the other side.”  He reiterated the view at a campaign event in which he claimed that the Trump-Vance ticket was a “threat to democracy” that would see rights removed and people placed in danger.

Given that much media coverage involves skipping over garbage cans rather than scouring the garbage, this was a perfect illustration about a figure who should, at best, stick to mediocre party slogans.  But no.  Harris, the Democratic anointed papier-mâché candidate for the White House, thought differently.

Many Democrats revelled in the fatuity of it all.  “Tim’s signature is his ability to talk like a human being and treat everyone with decency and respect,” said former President Barack Obama in a statement.  The Los Angeles Times was told by a Democratic source allegedly close to Harris that Walz revealed much “ease in cutting through political jargon to deliver a straight message,” something that appealed to her.

Walz may have an advantage insofar as he is utterly unknown to the voters that will swing the election.  Outside his state, he is clean, cold tabula rasa and utterly without distinction.  The figure of no record can create something anew.  But the person overlooked for his role – Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania – may well cause tongues wagging, not least through his supporters.

Shapiro certainly would have been a far more interesting choice.  Hypocritically, he was attacked by members of his own party for adopting an enthusiastically pro-Israeli position in the Israel-Hamas War, one that most Democrats implicitly, or explicitly support through the continued supply of arms sales to the Netanyahu government.  But perfumed cant and ham performances are everything in Washington, and Shapiro’s refusal to condemn the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza with appropriate ceremony drew such labels as “Genocide Josh”.

A perplexed Jared Moskowitz, Democratic Representative from Florida, summarised the issue with lean clarity: “Josh’s position on Israel is almost identical to everybody else, but he’s being held to a different standard.  So you have to ask yourself why.”  Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, also from Florida, noted with suspicion that Shapiro, as “the only Jewish candidate is getting excruciating, very specific scrutiny, particularly around his positions on Israel.”

William A. Galston, chair and senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, suggests two possible pitfalls to the Walz pick.  For one, he opens a flank for Republicans to argue that Harris has yielded to the more progressive side of the political aisle.

While there is much to rebut and rebuke about the Harris-is-Progressive position, her stances on the Green New Deal, supporting Medicare for All, among others, will provide ammunition for the GOP squirrels that will hardly be defused by this choice.  Walz is obviously there as stuffing for the moderate, even conservative voters, though this a severe misreading.  The days of Walz as a pro-gun rights member of the National Rifle Association are now the stuff of dusty archives and amnesiac diarists.

The notion that he is a siren to working-class voters and those from the rural constituency is also highly questionable.  Between 2018 and 2022, the gloss, notably in the rural areas, wore off.  In 2022, his re-election was largely attributable to the suburbanites of Minneapolis.  The current version of Walz is one endorsed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has been enthusiastic, along with other progressive voices, for his selection.

In another sense, as Galston goes on to suggest, this Harris pick could well aggravate some Democratic voters and squander the chance of a VP running mate able to draw in voters from a swinging state.  The solidly safe Democratic state of Minnesota is hardly likely to make a dent in the campaign funds of the major parties, let alone disrupt the electoral compass.

Shapiro, being the governor of one of the presumptive jewels of the Electoral College, exceeded President Joe Biden’s 2020 share in the state by some margin in a number of salient groups: seven points among rural and provincial voters; seven points among non-college voters; nine among Republicans and voters inclined to the Republicans, and five among Independents.

In the final count, the VP running mates of either side are unlikely to redirect navigation in any significant way.  Such candidates generally count as embroidery for the campaign, and, when in office, function accordingly.  That said, embroidery can still be noticed, and in this regard, Walz is remarkably unnoticeable.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Redacted.

Her tenure as Vice President has been far from glorious, a point she is not entirely blameworthy for given the generally titular nature of the role, “not worth,” as John Nance Garner famously opined, “a bucket of warm piss.”  While muddled and vapid musings at the high end of US politics is nothing new – George W. Bush demonstrated that becoming president is not contingent on lexical accuracy let alone rhetorical fluency – Harris has proffered a fair share of awful, and repetitive musings.  “We have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make the possible actually happen.”  And the platoons of the banal cheered.

Harris is certainly the donor’s newly minted candidate, which does much to suggest how anti-democratic the whole process has been.  Not that the process of selecting the Democratic nominee for the White House is particularly democratic, given that voters in the primaries do not directly select the candidate so much as delegates who will cast their votes for the figure at the National Convention.  Having switched their favours from the ageing and increasingly frail Joe Biden, the monetary approval of the donor base was well signalled by the speedy addition of US$81 million in less than 24 hours.  (Last month, the Harris campaign raised a total of US$310 million.)

The idea of a valid contest within the party has well withered on the vine, adding even more succour to the authoritarian varnish Harris’ critics identify as critical.  The sycophantic celebration of her presumptive nominee status, offering nothing by way of sustained critique of this pseudo-coronation process, adds even more of a gloss in that regard.  The National Review’s Dan McLaughlin is unsparing on this point.  As California Attorney General, Harris “was a dangerous authoritarian with an unlimited appetite for power who displayed contempt for the Constitution and no regard for the rights, dignity, faith or reputations of anyone in her way.”

In her failed attempt to secure the 2020 Democratic nomination, she threatened a range of executive orders that would most likely have been felled by the justices of the Supreme Court.  However appealing it would have been to the gun control lobby in terms of logic and sense, a ban on assault weapons was top of the list.  She also proposed removing Congressional scrutiny of immigration through a generous use of executive orders, hardly in keeping with the spirit of the elected chamber.  For someone keen to mark out the illiberal tendencies of Donald Trump and his imperial inclinations, her resume in this regard is conspicuously streaky.

Such a patchy record, notably during her Vice Presidential stint, would certainly explain the initial reluctance – and reticence – of former President Barack Obama in purchasing tickets for the Harris love train.  While any unattributed sources run in The New York Post should be treated with silver tongs, aired suspicions can still be useful.  Obama, according to The Post’s source, was “very upset” by Biden’s immediate endorsement of Harris “because he knows she can’t win.”  He knew “she’s just incompetent – the border czar who never visited the border, saying that all migrants should have health insurance.  She cannot navigate the landmines that are ahead of her.”

This “source” certainly sounds conveniently primed and rehearsed on various talking points that will chime with the MAGA crowd.  Obama, thus ventriloquised, is supposed to have said that Harris “can’t debate.  She’s going to put her foot in her mouth about Israel, Palestine, Ukraine.  She’s going to say something really stupid.”

Even if half-true, the comments would point to the need to have some form of contest, one possible were the Democratic Convention to be an open one.  In such circumstances, the challenging candidate would require the signatures of 300 delegates to get their name included in a roll-call vote.  The majority winning the votes of all available delegates would thereby secure the nomination.  As things have turned out, Harris has already reached the 2,350 delegate threshold of the 4,000 available via a virtual roll call.

Without delving too much into inscrutable tealeaves, this might have appeared on Obama’s political radar as a possibility, opening the prospects for any number of candidates who are now shaping up to become a running mate for Harris.  An open nomination process is also reported to have interested former House speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

The New York Times, that reliable organ of establishment politics and anti-Trump mania, has also aired the view that the Democratic Party, in not endorsing a competitive process, had adopted “the playbook of ruling parties in authoritarian states.”  From the top, the choice has been dictated; the rank and file had to accordingly “fall in line and clap enthusiastically.”  The “manifest weaknesses” of Harris – her unpopularity, her poor campaigning, her abysmal management and tendency towards favouritism, her “penchant for excruciating banality,” and her Bay Area standing – were to be religiously ignored.

Whatever his reservations, the Democratic Party machine eventually proved powerful enough to sway Obama, and his wife, Michelle.  In an emetic video posted on July 26, Harris is shown accepting a joint phone call from the former first couple at a suitably choreographed point as she walks backstage at an event.  “We called to say Michelle and I couldn’t be prouder to endorse you and do everything we can to get you through this election and into the Oval Office.”  The Harris papier-mâché coronation to the Democratic National Convention starting on August 19 gathers pace.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

This week on CounterSpin: Dog whistles are supposed to be silent except for those they’re intended to reach. But as listeners know, the right wing has gotten much more overt and loud and yes, weird, about their intention to defeat the prospect of multiracial democracy. We unpack the latest weaponized trope—the “DEI hire”—with anti-racism educator and author Tim Wise.

(photo: Elvert Barnes)

Also on the show: Trying to help unhoused people and trying to make them invisible are different things. Keith McHenry, cofounder of Food Not Bombs, joins us to talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling that gave state authorities more power to dismantle the encampments in which many people live, with no guarantee that they will land anywhere more safe.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

With Joe Biden’s historic decision to step aside as Democratic nominee for president and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor, the 2024 presidential race has suddenly transformed from an uninspiring duel between two old white men to something altogether different. Powered by coconut memes and refreshing cognitive competence, Harris has surged in popularity. Young voters, in particular, have shown a burst of enthusiasm.

The Washington Post, however, is concerned. An energetic alliance between progressives and liberals behind a woman who ran to the left of Biden during the 2020 primary could signal a leftward shift of the Democratic Party, which has generally been dominated by centrists over the last several decades. That’s not something the Jeff Bezos–owned Post has much interest in.

Kamala Harris is gaining ground against Donald Trump with most sub-groups of voters (Financial Times, 7/26/24).

‘What Harris needs to do’

The Washington Post (7/22/24) urges Kamala Harris to ” resist activist demands that would push her to the left and ignore the social media micro-rebellion that will follow.”

So the editorial board decided it was time to weigh in. A day after Biden’s announcement that he was withdrawing, it published the editorial “What Harris Needs to Do, Now, to Win” (7/22/24).

In the piece, the board implores Harris to abandon progressive policy priorities such as “widespread student debt cancellation” and “nationwide rent stabilization” that Biden has backed during his term as president. Instead of promoting these policies, according to the board, Harris should mercilessly turn her back on the progressive wing of the party:

Ms. Harris should both resist activist demands that would push her to the left and ignore the social media micro-rebellion that will follow. Ms. Harris’s pick of running mate could be a revealing early indicator, too. Tapping a politician likely to appeal to the median voter would serve her—and the country—best.

This, we are to think, is not simply about the more conservative policy preferences of the members of the Post’s board. It is cold, calculated and smart electoral strategy. After all, everyone knows that America is a center-right country, and general election voters would never get behind a progressive platform. (Never mind that Biden adopted a slate of progressive policy positions in a desperate attempt to resuscitate his ailing campaign, precisely because these policies are so popular with the general electorate.)

Misty memories of 2020

Not only that, but remember what happened in 2020? In the Post’s telling, during that presidential primary, Harris

tried to play down her record as a tough-on-crime California prosecutor and embrace the progressive left of the Democratic Party, backing policies that lacked broad appeal, such as Medicare-for-all. She did not make it out of 2019 before folding her campaign.

The implication here seems to be that support for progressive policies hampered Harris’s campaign. A strange hypothesis, given that progressives such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did exceptionally well in that primary, and only lost after moderates consolidated around Biden in a last-minute tactical alliance.

Medicare-for-all, meanwhile, posted majority support from the American public throughout the 2020 primary season, and had garnered majority support for years before that, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. To be fair to the Post, the polling on this issue was incredibly sensitive to the framing of the question, so you could easily point to some poor results for the policy as well, often found in Fox’s (unsurprisingly biased) polling. But, unlike with many of the polls that returned unfavorable results, the wording used by Kaiser was eminently even-handed.

Polling by Kaiser (10/16/20) finds that Medicare for All has remained broadly popular for years.

In any case, what matters for the Post’s suggestion about Harris’s fate in the 2020 primary is not views among the general population, but views among Democrats. With that group, polls consistently found overwhelming support for Medicare-for-all. At best, then, we might call the Post’s claims here misleading, an attempt to pawn off opposition to a policy on the general public when, in fact, it’s really the paper that takes issue with it.

Ignoring full employment

Biden’s stimulus bill succeeded in keeping unemployment low for a span unprecedented in the past half century (Slate, 7/24/24)—but the Washington Post doesn’t want to talk about that.

The policies that the Post prefers Democrats to push are of a different sort, the Very Serious and bipartisan sort. Because only when Republicans also sign off on legislation is it any good. As the Post calls for a rightward turn from Harris, it celebrates the scarce moments of bipartisanship (sort of) over the last few years:

In the White House, Mr. Biden’s approach helped get substantial bipartisan bills over the finish line, investing in national infrastructure and critical semiconductor manufacturing. He also signed a bill that should have been bipartisan: the nation’s most ambitious climate change policy to date.

Conspicuously absent from the editorial is any mention of the American Rescue Plan, the stimulus bill passed in the spring of 2021 that spurred the most rapid and egalitarian economic recovery in recent American history. As the progressive journalist Zach Carter noted in a recent article titled “Full Employment Is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” (Slate, 7/24/24):

Across the 50 years preceding Biden’s tenure in office, the US economy enjoyed only 25 total months with an unemployment rate below 4%. Biden did it for 27 consecutive months—a streak broken only in May of this year, as an expanding labor force pushed the rate over 4% even as the economy actually added more jobs.

Given that the stimulus bill can claim much of the credit for this outcome, it stands as arguably the most significant legislative accomplishment of the Biden administration. For the Post, though, that’s apparently not worth highlighting.

Politically toxic

It’s “surprisingly doable” to cut the national debt, says the Washington Post (7/23/24)–especially if you don’t mind imposing cuts that are overwhelmingly unpopular.

Also conspicuously missing from the Post editorial is any discussion of the potential electoral damage that could result from continuing Biden’s support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In May of this year, the American Arab Institute estimated, based on their polling, that Biden could lose as many as 177,000 Arab American votes compared to his performance in 2020 across four swing states. It would be worth discussing this policy failure, and the ways in which Harris should break from Biden on Gaza, if the Post were really interested in helping Harris win. But that would distract the paper from advocating incredibly unpopular centrist policies.

Take its editorial (7/23/24) published a day after it admonished Harris for supporting Medicare-for-all, due to that policy’s supposed unpopularity. This piece finds the editorial board once again calling for cuts to Social Security, specifically through raising the retirement age. Benefit cuts are opposed by 79% of Americans, and raising the retirement age polls almost equally badly, with 78% of Americans opposing an increase in the retirement age from 67 to 70. Yet the Post evidently finds it critical to advocate this politically toxic policy just as Harris gets her campaign off the ground and starts shaping her platform.

As of now, it looks like Harris could break either way in the coming months. Her choice to tap Eric Holder, a corporate Democrat hailing from the Obama administration, to vet candidates for vice president, suggests a possible rightward shift. As do her team’s overtures to the crypto world. On the other hand, her relatively cold reception of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his recent visit could signal a leftward turn.

In short, Harris seems to remain persuadable on the direction of her campaign and the content of her platform. Unfortunately, while the Washington Post is doing its best to convince Harris to move right, there exists no comparable outlet representing the interests of the progressive wing of the party that can fight back.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Conor Smyth.

The thing I hate about Western electoral politics in general and US presidential races in particular is that they take the focus off the depravity of the US-centralised Empire itself, and run cover for its criminality.

In the coming months you’re going to be hearing a lot of talk about the two leading presidential candidates and how very very different they are from each other, and how one is clearly much much worse than the other.

But in reality the very worst things about both of them will not be their differences — the worst things about them will be be the countless ways in which they are both indistinguishably in lockstep with one another.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

As the Democratic Party began to coalesce behind Kamala Harris, the New York Times‘ popular Morning newsletter (7/23/24) quickly put forward the knee-jerk corporate media prescription for Democratic candidates: urging Harris to the right.

Under the subhead, “Why moderation works,” David Leonhardt explained that “the average American considers the Democratic Party to be further from the political mainstream than the Republican Party.”

As evidence, he pointed to two polls. The first was a recent Gallup poll that found Trump leading Biden on the question of who voters agreed with more “on the issues that matter most to you.” The second was a 2021 Winston poll asking people to rate themselves on an ideological scale in comparison to Democratic and Republican politicians; people on average placed themselves closer to Republicans than to Democrats.

Of course, these polls, which ask only about labels and perceptions, tell you much more about the fuzziness—perhaps even meaninglessness—of those labels than about how well either party’s policy positions align with voters’ interests, and what positions candidates ought to take in order to best represent those voters’ interests. Responsible pollsters would ask about actual, concrete policies in the context of information about their impact; otherwise, as former Gallup editor David Moore has pointed out (FAIR.org, 2/11/22), they merely offer the illusion of public opinion.

‘Radical’ Democrats

For the New York Times‘ David Leonhardt (7/23/24), the first question about Kamala Harris is “whether she will signal that she’s more mainstream than other Democrats.”

And where do people get the idea that the Democratic Party is, as Leonhardt says, “radical,” and misaligned with them on important issues?

Of course, the right-wing media and right-wing politicians offer a steady drumbeat of such criticism, painting even die-hard centrists like Joe Biden as radical leftists. But centrist media play a starring role here, too, having long portrayed progressive Democratic candidates and officials as extreme and out of step with voters.

For instance, the Times joined the drumbeat of centrist media attacks on Sen. Bernie Sanders for supposedly being too far out of the mainstream to be a serious 2016 presidential candidate (FAIR.org, 1/30/20). Forecasting the 2016 Democratic primary race, the Times’ Trip Gabriel and Patrick Healy (5/31/15) predicted that

some of Mr. Sanders’ policy prescriptions—including far higher taxes on the wealthy and deep military spending cuts—may eventually persuade Democrats that he is unelectable in a general election.

As FAIR (6/2/15) noted at the time, most of Sanders’ key progressive positions—including raising taxes on the wealthy—were actually quite popular with voters. Cutting military spending is not quite as popular as taxing the rich, but it often outpolls giving more money to the Pentagon—a political position that the Times would never claim made a candidate “unelectable.”

Voters’ leading concern this election year (as in many election years) is the economy, and in particular, inflation and jobs. As most corporate media outlets have reported recently (e.g., Vox, 4/24/24; CNN, 6/26/24), economists are warning that Trump’s proposed policies—massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, as well as increased tariffs—will increase inflation. So, too, would deporting tens of millions of immigrants, as Trump claims he will do, as this would cause a major labor shortage in an already tight job market.

(It’s also worth noting here that, even without being given more context, a majority of respondents oppose Trump’s deportation plan—Gallup, 7/12/24.)

Representative democracy needs informed citizens who understand how well candidates will reflect their interests. Reporting like Leonhardt’s, using context-free polling and blithely ignoring the disconnect between what people concretely want and what candidates’ policies will do, only strengthens that disconnect and undermines democracy further.

‘Promising to crack down’

As the New York Times (7/24/24) has elsewhere noted, crime rates are currently lower than they have been in more than a generation.

Believing he has established that Democrats in general are “radical” (or else believing it’s more his job to pretend they are than to dispel the notion), Leonhardt in the next section asks, how can Harris “signal that she’s more mainstream than other Democrats”?

He offers “five Democratic vulnerabilities,” the first of which he says is crime—”the most natural way for Harris to show moderation,” since she is “a former prosecutor who won elections partly by promising to crack down on crime. Today, many Americans are worried about crime.”

Again, Leonhardt takes a misperception among voters—that crime rates are elevated—and rather than attempting to debunk it based on data, which show that violent and property crime rates are lower than they’ve been in more than a generation (FAIR.org, 7/25/24), he allows the unchallenged misperception to buttress his move-to-the-center strategy recommendation.

Next is immigration, where Leonhardt wrote that, since

most Americans are deeply dissatisfied that Biden initially loosened immigration rules…I’ll be fascinated to see whether Harris—Biden’s point person on immigration—tries to persuade voters that she’ll be tougher than he was.

The truth is, it’s hard to get much tougher on immigration than Biden without going the route of mass deportation and caging children, as he kept in place many of Trump’s harsh refugee policies, much to the dismay of immigrant rights advocates. But few in the public recognize that, given media coverage that dehumanizes immigrants and fearmongers about the border (FAIR.org, 6/2/23, 8/31/23).

‘Outside the mainstream’

In the face of racist and misogynist attacks on Kamala Harris from the Republican Party (Atlantic, 7/25/24), Leonhardt demanded that Harris prove she’s not “quick to judge people with opposing ideas as ignorant or hateful.”

Leonhardt called inflation another “problem for Harris,” again, without pointing out the reality that a Trump presidency would almost certainly be worse for inflation. And he closed with the problems of “gender issues” and “free speech,” which both fall under the “woke” umbrella that the Times frequently wields as a weapon against the left (FAIR.org, 3/25/22, 12/16/22).

He argues that liberals are “outside the mainstream” in supporting “gender transition hormone treatment for many children,” which he claims “doctors in Europe…believe the scientific evidence doesn’t support.” Leonhardt is cherry-picking here: While some doctors in some European countries believe that—most notably doctors in Britain who are not experts in transgender healthcare—it’s not the consensus view among medical experts in either Europe or the United States (FAIR.org, 6/22/23, 7/19/24).

“If Harris took a moderate position, she could undermine Republican claims that she is an elite cultural liberal,” Leonhardt wrote. By a “moderate position,” Leonhardt seems to mean banning access to hormone therapy for trans youth—a decidedly right-wing political position that, through misinformed and misleading media coverage, particularly from the New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/11/23), has become more politically acceptable.

Finally, on “free speech,” Leonhardt wrote that “many Americans view liberals as intolerant,” noting that “Obama combated this problem by talking about his respect for conservative ideas, while Biden described Republicans as his friends.”

It’s a topsy-turvy world in which the Black female candidate, who has received so many racist and sexist attacks in the past week that even Republican Party leaders have asked fellow members to tone it down (Atlantic, 7/25/24), is the one being admonished to be tolerant and respectful.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

The replacement of Joe Biden as the presidential nominee of the Democrat party was a dramatic demonstration that the lords of capital are the only segment of the U.S. population with real agency. The fact that select oligarchs, in this case, the cabal that actually runs the Democrat party, can remove a presidential nominee and expeditiously anoint Kamala Harris as his replacement cannot be characterized as anything else but a coup.

While this might read as extreme, the situation that African and oppressed people face in the U.S. and globally is also extreme. From killer cops who occupy cities and college campuses across the country, to genocide in Gaza, naivety is a luxury that the oppressed cannot afford. The oppressed must have a clear and sober understanding of the class and power dynamics in the Democrat Party but also in the broader society.  The gangster move by the oligarchs that control the Democrats stripped away any pretense that any real structures of democracy exist in that party.

Moreover, the ultimate expression of naivety would be to believe that it’s a mere coincidence that the driving forces of the coup are based in California and represent the same Silicon Valley class forces that attempted to impose Kamala Harris on U.S. voters in 2020.

That is why the specific details of how this drama unfolded, which is primarily the focus of the capitalist press is a diversion attempting to deflect attention away from the audacity and reality of oligarchical rule and the adaptation of regime change tactics that, up to now, were used primarily in nations in the Global South.

For almost two years it seemed obvious that Biden would not be a credible candidate in 2024 due to his noticeable cognitive decline and the ineptitude of his administration. This writer assumed that the decision was made as early as 2023 by the party bosses and Biden, but could not be made public because he would immediately become a lame-duck president.

But clearly that conversation had not taken place. Apparently, the real plan, which reflects the general low-life character of the bosses of that party, was to clear the field of any viable opponents during the party’s phony primary process. The bosses understood how division may not have allowed Biden to capture all of the delegates and seamlessly permit him to appoint his successor – who was in reality their successor. The money for that successor was on Galvin Newsom, the telegenic airhead governor of California.

That the party bosses set Biden up to take part in the earliest debate in modern presidential election history knowing he was not up to the task was more illuminating than ever. It was a perfectly orchestrated symphony of treachery. Following his ignominious performance, the only problems the party encountered were Biden’s resistance and the annoyance that the Black base of the party would not allow the bosses to overlook Harris as a viable contender. Both of those problems were addressed and solved adroitly.

However, with the anointing of Kamala Harris, what does it suggest for the policies and direction of a Harris administration? Beyond the novelty of a run by Harris, would there be any substantial divergence from the policies and political trajectory of the Biden/Harris agenda?

No daylight between Biden and Harris

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society… Marx grasped this essence splendidly when he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament.

— Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution, August/September 1917

Biden was a warrior for what became the neoliberal counterrevolution that was launched in the seventies. By the eighties, he worked in lock-step with the white supremacist, neoliberal Reagan administration in its assault on Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition and the Keynesian “welfare state,” supporting cuts in state expenditures for critical social services education, the environment, healthcare and more. By the nineties when the Soviet Union collapsed, Biden played a critical role in stripping away the rights of single women for state support (welfare reform) and championed the 1994 crime bill that generated the explosion of imprisonment, primarily of nationally oppressed Africans (Black people), Chicanos, Indigenous peoples and poor whites.

He was also instrumental in building bipartisan support for the invasion of Iraq and gave full-throated support to the coups and war policies under the Obama/Biden administration that resulted in the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Honduras, Egypt, and the Ukraine and military assaults on Yemen, the destruction of Libya and assassination of its leader, expansion of AFRICOM, the aggressive “pivot to Asia” and the subversion of Venezuela and war against Syria.

Biden’s career and his positions were a metaphor for the right-wing political course of not only the nation but specifically of the Democrat Party. In the thirty-plus years since the 1990s the nation and Democrat Party abandoned any pretense to the commitment to reform liberalism that characterized its politics up until the late seventies. The party gradually embraced what became known as neoliberalism, a neoliberalism that first emerged in the Republican Party under Reagan before migrating to the Democrats after consolidating under Bill Clinton and becoming today the hegemonic ideological and political force in that party.

From Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC) through Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hilary Clinton to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, every presidential contender in the democrat party had to express their fealty to the neoliberal agenda if they had any hope of receiving the largesse of the oligarchy that controlled the party.

Kamala Harris is no exception. In fact, many seem to have already forgotten that the same donors that executed the coup against Biden were the same ones that engineered the rigging of the elections against Bernie Sanders and attempted to impose Kamala Harris as the “new Obama” in 2020. It should not be forgotten that before the first debate during the 2020 Democrat party primary process, Harris led all contenders for the nomination in fundraising, with the base of her support coming from the same Silicon Valley base donors that led the coup against Biden.

Why Harris? Since the Democrat party is firmly in the grip of neoliberal finance and corporate capital, it really didn’t matter who would have been chosen. They would have received full support from the faction of the oligarchy that pulled off the coup.

But since it became apparent that Black voters were not going to allow the party bosses to overlook Harris and she had the office of the Vice President and access to the Biden/Harris war chest, it was more convenient for the oligarchs and party bosses to anoint her. In other words, she was in an advantageous position.

There was nothing about her policies worldview or vision because she has no independent policies, worldview, and certainly no vision beyond the agenda that the party and Biden administration have been committed to over the last three and a half years. The only thing that might be different is that she will drop the anti-trust suit the Biden administration initiated against elements of Big Tech in Silicon Valley.

As Harris said recently , “I am eager to run on the record of what Joe and I have accomplished together.” That means a continuation of the same – wars abroad and austerity domestically.

It is not clear if our dear sister Nina Turner was really serious when she stated that “Vice President Kamala Harris has an opportunity to bring a pro-peace, pro-working-class coalition together. She should come out forcefully against Netanyahu and advocate for policies that will help Americans who are struggling. Hopefully, she takes the opportunity.”

I think Nina has been around long enough to know that it is more likely that Trump would become a born-again Christian and embrace passivism before Harris violates her life experience and allegiance to white power by advocating for the social democratic policies that Turner is suggesting.

For the oppressed in this country and globally, sobriety is the order of the day. We don’t have the luxury of being inebriated by the liberal fantasies of the “toward a more perfect nation” crowd.

The U.S. empire is engaged in what it sees as an existential threat to its continued global dominance and it has demonstrated, from the coordinated attacks on students who were protesting against genocide to the bellicosity toward China, that there will be no deviation from the neoliberal agenda, an agenda that in its essence is fascistic and anti-human.

That means that no matter who sits in the white people’s house in 2025, we the oppressed will have to continue to struggle for a new world in which the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is no longer a global threat.  Authentic decolonization and societal transformation will not be achieved through any other means than the revolutionary defeat of the “collective West.”

Smash the duopoly, build dual and contending popular power, struggle as though your life depended on it, because it does.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ajamu Baraka.

In his inaugural presidential address on 20 January 2017, Donald Trump used a powerful phrase to describe the situation in the United States: ‘American carnage’. In 1941, seventy-six years before this speech, Henry Luce wrote an article in Life magazine about the ‘American century’ and the promise of US leadership to be ‘the dynamic centre of ever-widening spheres of enterprise’. During the period between these two proclamations, the United States went through an immense expansion known as the ‘Golden Age’ and then a remarkable decline.

That theme of decline has returned in Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. ‘We will not let countries come in, take our jobs, and plunder our nation’, Trump declared at the Republican National Convention on 19 July in his speech to accept his party’s presidential nomination. Trump’s words echoed his inaugural address from 2017, in which he said, ‘We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon’.

In seven decades, the United States’s self-image has fallen from the grandiose heights of an ‘American century’ to the bloodied present of ‘American carnage’. The ‘carnage’ that Trump identifies is not only in the economic domain; it defines the political arena. A failed assassination attempt against Trump comes alongside an open rebellion in the Democratic Party that ended with incumbent US President Joe Biden withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement. By all accounts, Trump will be favoured to defeat any Democratic candidate at the polls in November, since he leads in a handful of key ‘swing states’ (which house a fifth of the US population).

At the Republican convention, Trump tried to talk about unity, but this is a false language. The more US politicians talk about ‘bringing the country together’ or bipartisanship, the wider the divides tend to be between liberals and conservatives. What divides them is not policy as such, since the two parties both belong to the extreme centre that pledges to impose austerity on the masses while securing financial security for the dominant classes, but an attitude and orientation. A few domestic policies (important as they are, such as abortion rights) play a key role in allowing this difference of mood to emerge.

Robert Gwathmey (USA), Sunny South, 1944.

Reports and rumours filter out of US government documents that give a glimpse of the ongoing devastation of social life. Younger people find themselves at the mercy of precarious employment. Home foreclosures and evictions for those in the lower ends of the income bracket continue as sheriffs and debt-recovery paramilitaries scour the landscape for so-called delinquents. Personal debt has skyrocketed as ordinary people with inadequate means of earning a living turn to credit cards and the shady world of personal loan agencies to keep from starving. The Third Great Depression has made low-wage service workers with no benefits, most of whom are women, even more vulnerable. In earlier instances of economic depression, these women, with those jobs, stretched their invisible hearts across their families; now, even this love-fuelled glue is no longer available.

Hector Hyppolite (Haiti), Marinéte pie chè che (MARinÉ I), 1944–1946.

On 18 July, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its staff report on the United States, which showed that poverty rates in the country ‘increased by 4.6 percentage points in 2022 and the child poverty rate more than doubled’. This increase in child poverty is ‘directly attributed to the expiration of pandemic-era assistance’, the IMF wrote. No longer will any government in the United States, with its tanking economy and increasing military spending, provide access to basic conditions for survival for millions of families. One paragraph in the report struck me as particularly significant:

The increased pressure on lower income households is becoming more visible in an upswing in delinquencies on revolving credit. Furthermore, worsening housing affordability has aggravated access to shelter, particularly for the young and lower income households. This is evident in the number of people experiencing homelessness, which has risen to the highest level since data began to be compiled in 2007.

Swathes of the US landscape are now given over to desolation: abandoned factories make room for chimney swallows while old farmhouses become methamphetamine labs. There is sorrow in the broken rural dreams, the gap between the distress of farmers in Iowa not so far from the distress of peasants in Brazil, India, and South Africa. Those who had previously been employed in mass industrial production or in agriculture are no longer necessary to the cycles of capital accumulation in the United States. They have been rendered disposable.

By the time that China developed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to enhance infrastructure around the world in 2013, the United States had slipped into its own rust belt and broken road reality.

It is impossible for the US political class that is committed to this politics of austerity to control, let alone reverse, this downward spiral. Austerity policies cannibalise social life, razing everything that makes it possible for humans to live in the modern world. For decades, the parties of liberalism and conservatism have muted their historical traditions and become shadows of each other. Just as the water in a toilet rushes in a spiral and gets dragged into the sewer, the parties of the ruling class have dashed toward the extreme centre to champion austerity and to allow an obscene upward distribution of wealth in the name of spurring entrepreneurism and growth.

Whether in Europe or in North America, today the extreme centre is increasingly losing its legitimacy amongst populations in the Global North stunted by malaise. Ugly proposals allegedly seeking to spur growth that would have sounded acceptable three decades ago – such as tax cuts and increased military spending – now have a hollowness to them. The political class has no effective answers for stagnant growth and decayed infrastructure. In the United States, Trump has hit upon a politically expedient way of talking about the country’s problems, but his own solutions – such as the idea that militarising borders and escalating trade wars will be able to magically create the investment needed to ‘make America great again’ – are, in fact, just as hollow as those of his rivals. Despite enacting a set of laws to encourage productive investment (such as the Inflation Reduction Act, Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors [CHIPS] and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act), the US government has failed to address an enormous gap in necessary fixed capital formation. Apart from debt, there are few other sources for investment in the country’s infrastructure. Even the US Federal Reserve Bank doubts the possibility that the US can easily delink its economy from that of booming China.

Moisés Becerra (Honduras), Luchemos (Let’s Struggle), 1971.

It is tempting to throw around words like ‘fascism’ to describe political tendencies such as those led by Trump and an assorted group of right-wing leaders in Europe. But the use of this term is not precise, since it ignores the fact that Trump and others make up a far right of a special kind, one that is reasonably comfortable with democratic institutions. This far right pierces neoliberal rhetoric by appealing to the anguish caused by the decline of their countries and by using patriotic language that arouses great feelings of nationalism amongst people who have felt ‘left out’ for at least a generation. Yet, rather than blame the project of neoliberalism for that national decline, the leaders of this far right of a special kind blame it on working-class immigrants and on new cultural forms that have emerged in their countries (particularly increasing social acceptance for gender and racial equality and sexual freedom). Since this far right has no new project to offer to the people to reverse this decline, it forges ahead with neoliberal policies with as much gusto as the extreme centre.

Angelina Quic Ixtamer (Guatemala), Mayan Market, 2014.

In 1942, the economist Joseph Schumpeter published Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Schumpeter argued that, over its history, capitalism has generated a series of business downturns when failed enterprises close. In the ashes of these crashes, Schumpeter said, a phoenix is born through ‘creative destruction’. However, even if ‘creative destruction’ eventually produces new lines of enterprise and therefore employment, the carnage it causes results in the possibility of a political turn to socialism. Though the march to socialism has not yet taken place in the United States, larger and larger numbers of young people are more and more attracted to this possibility.

In 1968, the night before he was killed, Martin Luther King, Jr., said, ‘only when it is dark enough can you see the stars’. It now seems dark enough. Perhaps not in this election or the next one, or even the one after that, but soon the choices will narrow, the extreme centre – already illegitimate – will vanish, and new projects will germinate that will enhance the lives of the people instead of using the social wealth of the Global North to terrorise the world and enrich the few. We can see those stars. Hands are striving to reach them.

Warmly,

Vijay

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

In a piece factchecking Donald Trump’s claims in his acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican convention, the New York Times‘ Steven Rattner (7/24/24) responded to Trump’s claim that “our crime rate is going up” by pointing out:

Crime has declined since Mr. Biden’s inauguration. The violent crime rate is now at its lowest point in more than four decades, and property crime is also at its lowest level in many decades.

The Times illustrated the point with this chart, which shows violent crime decreasing by 26% since President Joe Biden was inaugurated, and property crime going down 19%:

In a rational world, voters would be aware that crime went down sharply during the Biden/Harris administration, continuing a three-decade decline that has made the United States of 2024 far safer than the country was in 1991. To the extent that voters see national elected officials as responsible for crime rates, Biden and his vice president Kamala Harris would benefit politically from these trends.

One thing polling tells us is that leading news outlets do a poor job of informing voters about the crime situation (New York Times, 7/23/24).

But we don’t live in a rational world—so in the days after Harris became the apparent presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, she got a series of warnings from the New York Times.

“Today, many Americans are worried about crime,” David Leonhardt wrote in the Times‘ popular Morning newsletter (7/23/24). “Many voters are concerned about crime and public safety,” lawyer Nicole Allan wrote in a Times op-ed (7/23/24). “Ms. Harris, especially, will run into problems on immigration and crime,” Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote in another op-ed (7/23/24).

“Ms. Harris was a constant target last week at the Republican National Convention,” Jazmine Ulloa reported in a Times news story (7/21/24). “In panels and onstage, speakers tied her to an administration that they say has led to increases in crime and inflation.”

In none of these mentions did the Times‘ writers attempt to set the record straight on the actual crime situation in the country—that crime rates are low and heading lower. In the case of the news report, such an observation would likely be seen inside the Times as editorializing—a forbidden intervention into the political process.

But most people don’t get their ideas about how much crime there is by personal observation; with roughly 1 person in 300 victimized by violent crime over the course of a year, you’d have to know an awful lot of people before you would get an accurate sense of whether crime was up or down based on asking your acquaintances.

As with immigration, and to a certain extent with the economy, people get the sense that crime is a crisis from the news outlets that they rely on. If they’re being told that “many Americans are worried about crime”—then many Americans are going to worry about crime.

Research assistance: Alefiya Presswala

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Jim Naureckas.

The process resulting in Biden’s decision had increasingly bulked over the last two months.  With each day, another Democratic figure would come out to suggest he pass the torch to another appropriate appointee of the establishment.  Whispers became roars.  Former President Barack Obama, whose deputy Biden had been, also joined the camp of dissent.  Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi likewise.

With the announcement made, tedious commentary claimed it was a “shock”.  What was shocking was the lengthy pondering from Democratic Party hacks and plotters that Biden had the reserves to carry off a campaign that would lead to another electoral victory. In doing so, the president was understandably gulled by the false assumption that he had the support that mattered.  For a moment, the puppet had forgotten his various masters, the strings loosened, the fantasy in reach.

Confidence in his own indomitability was seemingly shattered by the June 27 presidential debate with Trump.  But even then, he remained obstinate, his sense of delusion brimming.  On July 7, Biden declared that the only force that would convince him to stand aside was the “Lord Almighty”.  Subsequent interviews revised such a celestial standard by suggesting that matters of health or a sharp decline in the polls could also play a part.

A letter to Democrat lawmakers sent on July 8 had one purpose in mind: snuffing a movement that had begun gaining momentum.  “I can respond to all of this by saying clearly and unequivocally: I wouldn’t be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump.”  In a heavily coloured account, he suggested that his position as a presumptive nominee had never been in doubt.  “Only three people chose to challenge me.  One fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent.  Another attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated.”

To challenge his standing, imputed Biden, was to effectively ignore the rank-and-file of the party, suggesting a crude disenfranchisement.  This was a gloriously rich assertion, given that presidential nominations have far more to do with corporate, unelected donor interests and stratagems conducted out of public view than they do with the average voting citizen.

The view was also patently deceptive, given that rival contenders were not allowed onto the ballot in certain states (take Wisconsin and North Carolina as examples) or permitted to face a proper primary process.  Ironically enough, attitudes among the average voter Biden waxes lyrical over were already hardening in favour of an alternative candidate in polls conducted last year.  In April 2023, an Associated Press/NORC poll found from a sampling of 1,230 US adults that 73% would prefer he not run again, with age being a critical factor.

It has been left to the Democratic establishment to maintain the illusion of presumptive nomination right to the point the decision was made to scupper the whole effort.  Indeed, much of the Biden presidency has been stage managed, heavily padded and often choreographed to repel journalistic scrutiny of conduct and policy.  The New York Times even went so far as to find this hermetic capsuling “troubling”, given that the president had “so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term.”  By the end of June this year, the paper’s editorial board had openly endorsed the Joe Must Go viewpoint.

In a call-in to MSNBC’s Morning Joe after sending his letter of defiance, the president made no secret of his disdain for various party operatives who had begun to doubt his mettle.  The measure was theatrical, given that those same operatives have been his prop and stay.  Resorting to a tactic he has previously deployed, he scorned the unnamed elites who knew little about the true inclinations of the Democratic voter. Amidst his rambling answers to program hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, his agitation was clear enough: “I’m getting so frustrated by the elites – now I’m not talking about you guys – the elites in the party, ‘Oh they know so much more.’  Any of these guys that don’t think I should run, run against me.  Announce for president, challenge me at the convention.”

A few days later, Biden’s performance at the NATO Washington summit produced sharp intakes of breath when introducing the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.  He also managed to mangle his Vice President, confusing Kamala Harris with Trump.  The elites proved increasingly disgruntled.  With the donor base now in open revolt, threatening withdrawal of support, the decision was a foregone one.  Pity they are not willing to step aside as well.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

This is what controlled chaos looks like.

This year’s election-year referendum on which corporate puppet should occupy the White House has quickly become a lesson in how the Deep State engineers a crisis to keep itself in power.

Don’t get so caught up in the performance that you lose sight of what’s real.

This endless series of diversions, distractions and political drama is the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.

It works the same in every age.

This is how the police state will win, no matter which candidate gets elected to the White House.

You know who will lose? Every last one of us.

Politics today is about one thing and one thing only: maintaining the status quo between the Controllers (the politicians, the bureaucrats, and the corporate elite) and the Controlled (the taxpayers).

In other words, no matter who wins this next presidential election, you can rest assured that the new boss will be the same as the old boss, and we—the permanent underclass in America—will continue to be forced to march in lockstep with the police state in all matters, public and private.

Consider the following a much-needed reality check, an antidote if you will, against an overdose of overhyped campaign announcements, lofty electoral promises and meaningless patriotic sentiments that land us right back in the same prison cell.

FACT: According to a scientific study by Princeton researchers, the United States of America is not the democracy that it purports to be, but rather an oligarchy, in which “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy.”

FACT: Despite the fact that the number of violent crimes in the country is down substantially, the lowest rate in sixty years, the number of Americans being jailed for nonviolent crimes such as driving with a suspended license continues to skyrocket.

FACT: Thanks to an overabundance of 4,500-plus federal crimes and 400,000-plus rules and regulations, it is estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. In fact, according to law professor John Baker, “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime. That is not an exaggeration.”

FACT: Despite the fact that we have 38 million Americans living at or below the poverty line, 13 million children living in households without adequate access to food, and 1.2 million veterans relying on food stamps, enormous sums of taxpayer money continue to be doled out on wasteful programs that do little to improve the plight of those in need.

FACT: Since 2001 Americans have spent $93 million every hour for the total cost of the nation’s so-called war on terror.

FACT: It is estimated that 5 million children in the United States have had at least one parent in prison, whether it be a local jail or a state or federal penitentiary, due to a wide range of factors ranging from overcriminalization and surprise raids at family homes to roadside traffic stops.

FACT: At least 400 to 500 innocent people are killed by police officers every year. Indeed, Americans are now eight times more likely to die in a police confrontation than they are to be killed by a terrorist. Americans are 110 times more likely to die of foodborne illness than in a terrorist attack. Police officers are more likely to be struck by lightning than be made financially liable for their wrongdoing.

FACT: On an average day in America, over 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams. Most of those SWAT team raids are for a mere warrant service. There has been a notable buildup in recent years of heavily armed SWAT teams within non-security-related federal agencies such as the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Education Department.

FACT: For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government: the surveillance state. This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.

FACT: Everything we do will eventually be connected to the Internet. By 2030 it is estimated there will be 100 trillion sensor devices connecting human electronic devices (cell phones, laptops, etc.) to the Internet. Much, if not all, of our electronic devices will be connected to Google, which openly works with government intelligence agencies. Virtually everything we do now—no matter how innocent—is being collected by the spying American police state.

FACT: Americans know virtually nothing about their history or how their government works. In fact, according to a study by the National Constitution Center, 41 percent of Americans “are not aware that there are three branches of government, and 62 percent couldn’t name them; 33 percent couldn’t even name one.”

FACT: Only six out of every one hundred Americans know that they actually have a constitutional right to hold the government accountable for wrongdoing, as guaranteed by the right to petition clause of the First Amendment.

Perhaps the most troubling fact of all is this: we have handed over control of our government and our lives to faceless bureaucrats who view us as little more than cattle to be bred, branded, butchered and sold for profit.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if there is to be any hope of restoring our freedoms and reclaiming control over our government, it will rest not with the politicians but with the people themselves.

One thing is for sure: the reassurance ritual of voting is not going to advance freedom one iota.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Kamala’s negatives are even worse than Biden’s. That said, now that he has endorsed her – the party will have to accept her as their nominee.

It is going to be a landslide for Trump.

He will easily hit and surpass the 270 electoral votes needed to become the next President of the United States of America.

Only 58% of Democrats think Harris would make a good president.

Only 30% of the general public think she would make a good president

12% of Republicans think she would make a good president.

Polling, which was conducted by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, determined that a majority of Democrats believe the country would be in good hands if Harris took over.

Approximately 58 percent of Democrats think Harris would make a good president – while 22 percent think she would not and 20 percent ‘do not know enough to say’.

This is compared to the 30 percent of the general public that think Harris would make a good President and a staggering 87 percent of Republicans who said she would NOT make a good president.

She can’t recover from these numbers this late in the race!

Kamala’s nomination could bolster Kennedy’s influence, a crucial development as his voice is essential on the national stage. His continued presence in the race, and potential engagement by President Trump, could significantly impact the future political landscape.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Malone.

In a statement issued ahead of the meeting between Guatemala’s President Bernardo Arévalo and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday, March 25, the organizations called on the two leaders to undertake tangible measures to promote and safeguard press freedom in Guatemala, to endorse efforts aimed at securing the release of journalist José Rubén Zamora, and to advocate for the protection of journalists who have faced arrests and prosecutions in recent years. 

Here is the text of the joint statement:

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

This jarring picture, discordant and hopelessly at odds, is increasingly running down the low stocks of credibility US diplomats have in either the Israel-Hamas conflict, or much else in Middle Eastern politics.  Comments such as these from US Vice President Kamala Harris from March 3, made at Selma in Alabama, illustrate the problem: “As I have said many times, too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.  And just a few days ago, we saw hungry, desperate people approach aid trucks, simply trying to secure food for their families after weeks of nearly no aid reaching Northern Gaza. And they were met with gunfire and chaos.”

Harris goes on to speak of broken hearts for the victims, for the innocents, for those “suffering from what is clearly a humanitarian catastrophe”.  A forced, hammed up moral register is struck.  “People in Gaza are starving.  The conditions are inhumane.  And our common humanity compels us to act.”

It was an occasion for the Vice President to mention that the US Department of Defense had “carried out its first airdrop of humanitarian assistance, and the United States will continue with these airdrops.”  Further work would also be expended on getting “a new route by sea to deliver aid.”

It is only at this point that Harris introduces the lumbering elephant in the room: “And the Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid.  No excuses.”  They had to “open new border crossings”, “not impose any unnecessary restrictions on the delivery of aid” and “ensure humanitarian personnel, sites, and convoys are not targeted.”  Basic services had to be restored, and order promoted in the strip “so more food, water, and fuel can reach those in need.”

In remarks made at Hagerstown Regional Airport in Maryland, President Joe Biden told reporters that he was “working with them [the Israelis] very hard.  We’re going to get more – we must get more aid into Gaza.  There’s no excuses.  None.”

In a New Yorker interview, White House National Security spokesman John Kirby keeps to the same script, claiming that discussions with the Israelis “in private are frank and very forthright.  I think they understand our concerns.”  Kirby proceeds to fantasise, fudging the almost sneering attitude adopted by Israel towards US demands.  “Even though there needs to be more aid, and even though there needs to be fewer civilian casualties, the Israelis have, in many ways, been receptive to our messages.”

The other side of this rusted coin of US policy advocates something less than human.  The common humanity there is tethered to aiding the very power that is proving instrumental in creating conditions of catastrophe.  The right to self-defence is reiterated as a chant, including the war goals of Israel which have artificially drawn a distinction between Hamas military and political operatives from that of the Palestinian population being eradicated.

Harris is always careful to couple any reproachful remarks about Israel with an acceptance of their stated policy: that Hamas must be eliminated.  Hamas, rather than being a protean force running on the fumes of history, resentment and belief, was merely “a brutal terrorist organization that has vowed to repeat October 7^th again and again until Israel is annihilated.”  It had inflicted suffering on the people of Gaza and continued to hold Israeli hostages.

Whatever note of rebuke directed against the Netanyahu government, it is clear that Israel knows how far it can go.  It can continue to rely on the US veto in the UN Security Council.  It can dictate the extent of aid and the conditions of its delivery into Gaza, which is merely seen as succour for an enemy it is trying to crush.  While alarm about shooting desperate individuals crowding aid convoys will be noted, little will come of the consternation.  The very fact that the US Airforce has been brought into the program of aid delivery suggests an ignominious capitulation, a very public impotence.

Jeremy Konyndyk, former chief of the USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Obama administration gives his unflattering judgment on this point.  “When the US government has to use tactics that it otherwise used to circumvent the Soviets and Berlin and circumvent ISIS in Syria and Iraq, that should prompt some really hard questions about the state of US policy.”

In his remarks to The Independent, Konyndyk finds the airdrop method “the most expensive and least effective way to get aid to a population.  We almost never did it because it is such an in-extremis tool.”  Even more disturbing for him was the fact that this woefully imperfect approach was being taken to alleviate the suffering caused by an ally of the United States, one that had made “a policy choice” in not permitting “consistent humanitarian access” and the opening of border crossings.

Even as this in extremis tool is being used, US made military hardware continues to be used at will by the Israel Defence Forces.  The point was not missed on Vermont Democratic Senator Peter Welch: “We have a situation where the US is airdropping aid on day one, and Israel is dropping bombs on day two.  And the American taxpayer is paying for the aid and the bombs.”

The chroniclers of history can surely only jot down with grim irony instances where desperate, hunger-crazed Palestinians scrounging for US aid are shot by made-in-USA ammunition.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

His whole fall from grace as deputy-prime minister was all the more revealing for being instigated by his politically insatiable mentor, Mahathir bin Mohammed, Southeast Asia’s wiliest, and most ruthless politician.  Eventually, that old, vengeful fox had to relent: his former protégé would have his day.

Anwar is in no mood to take sides on spats between the grumbly titans who seek their place in posterity’s sun.  And why should a country like Malaysia do so?  During last year’s visit to Beijing and the Boao Forum in Hainan, he secured a commitment from Chinese President Xi Jinping on foreign investment amounting to RM170.1 billion ($US35.6 billion) spanning 19 memoranda of understanding (MOU).  Greater participation in Malaysia’s 5G network plan by Chinese telecommunications behemoth Huawei was assured some weeks later.

In the Financial Times, the Malaysian PM levelled the charge against the United States that Sinophobia had become a problem, a fogging fixation.  Why should Malaysia, he asked, “pick a quarrel” with China, a country that had become its foremost trading partner?  “Why must I be tied to one interest?  I don’t buy into this strong prejudice against China, this China-phobia.”

Much of this middle-of-the-road daring was prompted by comments made by US Vice President Kamala Harris, who has been saddled with the task of padding out ties between Washington and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).  Rather than being diplomatic, the Veep has been irritatingly teacherly.

Last September, during her visit to the US-ASEAN summit in Jakarta, Harris beat the drum on the issue of promoting “a region that is open, interconnected, prosperous, secure, and resilient.”  Such openness was always going to be subordinate to Washington’s own interests.  “We have a shared commitment to international rules and norms and our partnership on pressing national and regional issues”.  An international campaign against “irresponsible behaviour in the disputed waters” would be commenced.

During her trip to the Philippines last November, Harris made the focus of concern clear to countries in the region.  “We must stand up for principles such as respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, unimpeded lawful commerce, the peaceful resolution of disputes, and the freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea, and throughout the Indo-Pacific.”

The subtext for those listening was so obvious as to be scripted in bold font: Our values first; China’s a necessarily distant second.  This coarse directness did not fall on deaf ears, and Anwar was particularly attentive.  He had already found the views voiced by Harris at Jakarta about Malaysia’s leanings towards Beijing as “not right and grossly unfair”.

In remarks made during a joint press conference with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese held at the current ASEAN summit, being hosted in Melbourne, Anwar expressed much irritation in being badgered by the United States and its allies on the subject of taking sides.  The virus of Sinophobia had been doing the rounds, causing sniffles and rumbles.  “[M]y reference to China-phobia is because the criticism levied against us for giving additional focus on China; my response is, trade investments is open and right now, China seems to be the leading investor and trade into Malaysia,” Anwar observed.  Malaysians, for the most part, “do not have a problem with China.”

Labouring, even flogging the “fiercely independent” standing of Malaysia, Anwar went on to state that his country remained “an important friend of the United States and Europe and here in Australia, they should not preclude us from being friendly to one of our important neighbours, precisely China.”

Nothing typifies this better than Malaysia’s policy towards the supply and manufacturing of semiconductors.  The emergence of a China Plus One Strategy, notably in the electronic supply chain, has seen companies diversify their risk through investing in alternative markets to mitigate risks.  Keep China on side but do so securely.  Anwar has established a task force dedicated to the subject, while also courting such entities as US chipmaker Micron Technology.  Last October, the company promised an investment of US$1 billion to expand its Penang operations, in addition to the previous allocation of $US1 billion to construct and fully equip its new facility.  In business, such promiscuity should be lauded.

Anwar’s concerns were solid statements of calculated principle, and inconceivable coming out of the mouth of an Australian politician.  Albanese, for his part, has tried to walk the middle road when it comes to security in the Indo-Pacific, even as China remains Australia’s largest trading partner.  He does so in wolf’s clothing supplied by Washington, with various garish labels such as “AUKUS” and “nuclear-powered submarines”.  For decades, Australia’s association with ASEAN has been ventriloquised, the voice emanating from the White House, Pentagon or US State Department.

Canberra’s middle road remains cluttered by one big power, replete with US road signs and tolls, accompanied by hearty welcomes from the US military industrial complex and its determination to turn Australia into a forward defensive position, a garrison playing war’s waiting game.  To his credit, Anwar has avoided the trap, exposing the inauthentic position of his Australian hosts with skill and undeniable charm.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

21 February 2023: “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never. (Applause.)”

13 July 2023: “We will not waver … for as long as it takes”.

24 August 2023 “Our commitment to Ukraine’s independence is unwavering and enduring.”

21 September 2023 “Mr. President [Zelensky], we’re — we’re with you, and we’re staying with you.”

If Kamala Harris will become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Presidency, then she will never be able to disassociate herself from having been his #2.

On the other hand: If RFK Jr. will be the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Presidency, then he will surely win the Presidency (unless he becomes assassinated) because he has been saying, all along, that Biden’s refusal for Ukraine to negotiate with Russia was serving only to increase the bloodshed in that war — which has been proven to have been correct. He not only criticized what Biden was doing but said that Biden’s saying that if Russia wins the war, then America loses the war, and that if America wins the war, then Russia loses the war, casts that war as being of existential importance to both countries, which is blatantly false because Ukraine has nothing to do with America’s national security. It’s thousands of miles away and poses no threat to America, but it is only 300 miles away from the Kremlin. It is, therefore, even closer to Russia’s central command than Cuba was to America’s central command in Washington DC in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. American missiles in Ukraine would pose an even bigger threat to Russia than Soviet missiles in Cuba would have posed to America. RFK Jr. has strongly opposed Biden’s Ukraine policy, which was Obama’s Ukraine policy — the policy aimed at conquering Russia — but Trump never did anything to reverse the Obama-Biden Ukraine policy. So, if America loses the war in Ukraine, then RFK Jr. would trounce Trump, but Trump would trounce Biden.

If Trump becomes the Republican nominee, then he would easily beat Biden as the opposite Party’s nominee but would lose to Kennedy as that Party’s nominee, because Trump, while he still was in office, did nothing to reverse the horror that Obama had done to Ukraine by grabbing it in his 2014 Maidan U.S. coup and installing there a rabidly anti-Russian government which produced the war in Ukraine, which started soon after that coup.

Biden was carrying out Obama’s Ukraine-policy against Russia, but Trump did nothing to reverse it and to end the war there that Obama had started by grabbing Ukraine.

Therefore, if Russia wins the war in Ukraine, then virtually any Republican would beat Biden as the Democratic nominee, but RFK Jr. would beat any Republican nominee. RFK Jr. has none of the taint of the Obama-Biden Ukraine policy, but Obama and Biden couldn’t have carried out that policy if it didn’t have virtually unanimous support from congressional Republicans. Whereas RFK Jr. can free the Democratic Party of the taint of the Obama-Biden Ukraine policy, there is no Republican who can free the Republican Party from the taint of that policy.

If Russia wins in Ukraine, then only RFK Jr. could beat any Republican nominee.

However, if America wins in Ukraine (which Russia won’t allow, because that would pose a severe existential threat to Russia’s national security; it would mean the end of Russia as an independent sovereign nation), then Biden (or another neoconservative Democrat) will (tragically for the entire world) win in 2024.

Of course: if Ukraine’s war drags on for as long as Biden is hoping it will, then the likelihood is high that he will win the nomination; and, then, he would stand a reasonably strong chance of again winning the Presidency. This is the reason why I’m expecting Russia to win the war on its terms and within the next few months (this year) — not allow it to drag on until the 2024 voting starts in America.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

This is not accidental, because the US has encountered quite a lot of such “soft nails” in many other places across the world. For example, when the US went to Africa with a so-called aid plan to counter China, what it received was a vigilant response. When US Vice President Kamala Harris visited Africa earlier this year, President of Ghana Nana Akufo-Addo said, “There may be an obsession in America about Chinese activity on the continent, but there is no such obsession here.” In ASEAN, whether senior US officials go to ASEAN or Washington invites ASEAN to the US for a meeting, “not taking sides” is the basic principle repeatedly and publicly emphasized by ASEAN countries. In the Middle East and other places, the situation is the same. When the same situation occurs time and again, it is indeed necessary for the US to reflect on why this is the case.

In fact, the reason is very simple. It is difficult for a person who is unwilling to listen and respect others to be welcomed. The signal received by the US has been strong enough, that is, the world is unwilling to fall into division and confrontation, and hopes for more peace and cooperation. This has become a trend. Washington seems to have noticed these signals, but it still doesn’t pay attention. On the surface, it holds the bait of “cooperation,” but its heart is full of how to use these “cooperation” to undermine China’s influence. The similar scenes that appeared repeatedly during Blinken’s visit this time are enough to illustrate the deep-seated problems of the current US diplomacy. To put it simply, the goals of US diplomacy have formed a huge dislocation, or even contradiction and antagonism, with the vital interests of quite a number of countries.

Take the South Pacific countries as an example. These countries value a peaceful and stable environment and sustainable economic development. In addition, due to geographical factors, South Pacific countries also pay special attention to climate change and marine environmental issues, such as Japan’s reckless plan to dump nuclear-contaminated wastewater. In these respects, China has been their most reliable partner. Now the US came to tell these countries that the pair of shoes they are wearing does not fit, take that pair off off quickly, and put on the pair brought by the US. Whether the shoes fit or not, don’t the people who wear them know?

After all, people in any country want to live a peaceful life, and what meets this need is positive energy, otherwise it is negative energy. As some scholars have said, Washington today must adapt to a new reality: developing countries are becoming more mature and more capable of independent decision-making. When American officials make a visit, their pockets are often full of rhetoric to smear China that no one needs. Creating uneasiness and distrust between a country and its largest and most reliable partner is a despicable act, which is a scourge to the country and its people, and is life-threatening.

In recent years, in order to counter China, the US has launched various “grand” plans, but basically much is said but little is done. For example, the Build Back Better World in 2021 almost copied the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, but even the Americans called it a “Waterloo.” What’s more, even when the US invests in certain projects, most of them are either not feasible, or feed the pockets of those in charge.

These practices make the US look like a malicious bidder in the international community. It disrupts the normal cooperation of others, but it takes no responsibility for cooperation at all, allowing those projects to remain unfinished. Ultimately, it’s a mixture of hegemony and rogue thinking. Perhaps the US feels that it has big fists and is not afraid of anyone coming to hold it accountable. But what is certain is that if the US does not change this behavior, it will encounter more and more “soft nails.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Global Times.