Elections, Genocide, and a Federal Reserve Cut

Recent polls confirm that the U.S. presidential race is extremely tight between Kamala Harris – supported by the Party of Order, including prominent Republicans such as Bush’s warmongering and powerful Vice President Richard Cheney – and Donald Trump. While many individual capitalists support Donald Trump, the really big money is behind Harris. This gives Harris a considerable advantage. When the big money deserted Genocide Joe Biden earlier this year, he was forced out of the race. The big money wasn’t concerned about his support of Israel’s Gaza genocide. The money bags didn’t believe Biden could win after his disastrous performance in the June 27 “debate” with Trump.

Polls taken on the eve of the September “debate” between Harris and Trump showed the election either even or leaning toward Trump, though Harris took the lead afterward. (1 )

Trump, however, can still win. What determines the presidential election in the U.S. is not the popular vote but the vote in the electoral college. The electoral college strongly favors Republicans. There is a good chance that Harris will win the popular vote – though this is far from certain – only to lose to Trump in the electoral college. This is exactly what happened in 2016 when Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by two million votes, but Trump carried the electoral college.

(1) I put the word “debate” in quotation marks because the “debates” between the Democratic and Republican candidates for president exclude all third-party candidates. Actually, these are not debates as traditionally defined about contending policies but instead are more like commercial, promotional advertisements aimed at deceiving the listeners. For example, in the September 10 debate, neither Trump nor Harris denounced the U.S.-supported genocide in Gaza. Instead of seriously discussing foreign, domestic, or economic policy in these debates, the rival candidates concentrate on putting their opponent in the worst light possible while trying to drum up enthusiasm for their personal qualities. The Democratic and Republican candidates use deception and, when necessary, outright lies to do this. A poster supporting Harris declares: “Vote Joy 2024.”

Assassinated in Tehran

Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by an Israeli-planted explosive device on July 31 in Tehran, Iran. Haniyeh was in Iran to attend the inauguration of the new president, Masoud Pezeshkia. Haniyeh had been heavily involved in diplomatic activity for some kind of ceasefire to partially pause the Israeli genocide in Gaza. I say partially because disease, hunger, and thirst will continue to take a toll even when the bombing stops. His murder occurred just weeks after Netanyahu, addressing Congress, received standing ovations as tens of thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets of Washington, D.C., demanding Netanyahu’s arrest.

Haniyeh’s murder shows that the Zionist entity wants to keep on bombing, a campaign that’s killed tens of thousands of Palestinians — many women and children — as long as they can get away with it. They aim to kill as many Gazans as possible while forcing the remainder to leave Palestine.

As they did last April, after the Israeli attacks on Iran’s embassy in Syria, Tehran promised retaliatory attacks. Unlike April’s response of largely demonstrative attacks, this time, they’ve hinted the attacks will cause real damage to Israel. So far (as of August 18, 2024), there have been no attacks while the diplomatic activity continues.

Genocide Joseph Biden Bows Out

On July 21, President Joseph Biden announced he was dropping his reelection campaign. He endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, as the next Democratic nominee for president of the United States. Top leaders are rallying behind Harris to stop any challenge from another Democrat.

The closest thing to this in modern history was President Lyndon Johnson’s announcement that he would not be a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination for the 1968 election. In June 1968, the leading candidate, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated. This led to the nomination of Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who lost to Richard Nixon.

Due to his advanced age, Biden was originally supposed to serve only one term, but somewhere along the way, he decided to run for a second. The Democratic Party seemed ready — with little opposition from its leaders — to nominate him at its national convention, scheduled for August 19 through 22 in Chicago.

Presidential Election Goes From Bad to Worse

Note

Since this was written, the U.S. presidential election has gone from worse to far worse due to Joseph Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 debate with Donald Trump. Though I am no expert on these matters, Biden seemed to show signs of dementia. Dementia is not at all unusual for a man of his age.

All types of dementia are progressive, which means they get steadily worse over time. It’s hard to see how Biden will be able to serve as president until January 20, 2029.

The Democrats are discussing whether they should dump Biden—which would seem to be a no–brainer—and how to do that. As things stand, there appears to be almost nothing between Donald Trump and the White House. The truth is that the U.S. political system is ill-designed to handle this type of situation. I will have more to say on this next month.

How Vietnam defeated U.S. imperialism

In the northern hemisphere, May brings the return of warm weather as summer approaches. The school year winds down for students, graduation ceremonies are held, and degrees are awarded. But this year, all this happened in the shadow of the continued genocide in Gaza, with its tens of thousands of martyrs, the majority of them women and children.

In the final month of the 2024 school year, the student intifada against the collaboration of universities and the government with genocide swept U.S. campuses and spread around the imperialist world. In the meantime, Democrats and Republicans responded by launching attacks against academic freedom.

Billionaire capitalists who donate to university institutions forced their presidents, their loyal servants, to resign for not sufficiently repressing students. Under this pressure, some students who had completed their undergraduate studies were denied degrees, faced criminal charges, or punished in other ways.

Student Protests Against U.S.-Supported Israeli Genocide Spread Globally

Building since October 2023, the final weeks of April 2024 saw an explosion of student protests against U.S.-supported Israeli genocide in Gaza on campuses across the U.S. and the world. The latest, at Columbia University in New York City, was the site of a previous protest in 1968. That one was against Columbia’s ties to the U.S. military during the Vietnam War and was part of a wave of student protests around the country. It spread to France and helped trigger the great workers’ General Strike of May-June 1968.

The 2024 Columbia students demand:

Divest all finances, including the endowment, from corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine.
Complete transparency for all of Columbia’s financial investments.
Amnesty for all students and faculty disciplined or fired in the movement for Palestinian Liberation.

As of April 29, protests have swept across so many campuses that we don’t have the room to list them. We can safely say nothing of this scale has been seen since the May 1970 student strikes against Nixon’s extension of the Vietnam War to Cambodia.

The Genocide Continues

Israel’s relentless genocide against the people of Gaza continues without letup as I write these lines. In recent weeks, U.S. imperialism has tried to create the impression they’re putting some distance between themselves and the Israeli regime. For example, the Democratic Senate majority leader Charles Schumer said, “As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me: The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7. The world has changed, radically, since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past”.

Schumer is right about one thing: The world changed after October 7 as massive protests broke out across the globe, including within the United States. It isn’t only Schumer. Genocide Joe’s administration, after vetoing every ceasefire proposed in the UN Security Council, introduced a resolution of its own, the nature of which was summarized by Russian representative Vassily Nebenzia.

“Nebenzia further described the vote as a ploy to throw [U.S. voters in support of a ceasefire] a bone’ with a false ceasefire call,” the web publication Truthout reported.

The Fate of Rafah

As I write these lines on Feb. 25, 2024, the immediate future of the genocide waged by Israel against the people of the Gaza Strip is coming down to the fate of the small southern city of Rafah. The vast majority of Gazans have been rendered homeless, as Israel’s bombing campaign has destroyed or made uninhabitable most of the housing stock of what was Gaza City as well as the rest of the strip.

Since October, Gaza’s people have been crowded into the city of Rafah along the border with Egypt. In the next few weeks, the question is whether Israel will destroy Rafah, killing or driving out its population, or will Israel be forced to accept a temporary ceasefire. Without a ceasefire, the effects of the bombing and other military actions, plus thirst, hunger, and disease, will kill Gazans or force them out of Palestine altogether. A ceasefire would buy time and pressure the U.S.-led imperialists to allow aid to reach the people so they can stay alive and keep fighting to stay and rebuild in the future. But this presents a danger to Israel.

The danger is when the war — if this kind of genocide can be called a war — ends in some kind of ceasefire — those who’ve survived it will still be in place, fighting and eventually liberating their entire homeland. This would be a defeat for Israel and its aim of transforming itself from the settler colony it is today into a real nation along the lines of Canada, Australia, or the United States. These nations began as settler colonies but became nations, in part, by crushing the native population.

How Vietnam Won, Part 1

On January 14, 2024, 400,000 pro-Palestinian anti-genocide demonstrators marched in Washington, D.C., to the White House (occupied by the Democrat President “Genocide Joseph Biden”). Tens of thousands more marched in support of Gaza in San Francisco, California, the following day.

The stakes could not be higher. Those of us living in the United States have a special responsibility to do all we can to force the government to halt its support to Israel. Though it is the Israeli government carrying out the genocide on the ground, it could not commit these nightmarish crimes without the financial, political, military, and moral support provided by the government headed by Genocide Joe.

The genocide — there is no other word for it — has continued without let-up in Gaza. Israel aims to kill people directly or through hunger and disease, then drive out the rest of the population as far away as possible from Palestine. The January 3 edition of the Middle East Monitor reports, “According to the Times of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is discreetly exploring the acceptance of thousands of migrants from Gaza, with the Democratic Republic of Congo being one of the countries under consideration. ‘Congo will be willing to take in migrants,’ said a senior source in the security cabinet, ‘and we’re in talks with others.’”

Can the Palestinians Win?

The year 2023 was dominated by Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza beginning in October. It was supposedly in response to the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood attack on Israel by Hamas [Islamic Resistance Organization] and other Palestinian resistance organizations on October 7, 2023. Many so-called liberals, progressives, socialists, and even some Marxists have attacked the alleged excesses Palestinian fighters committed, such as beheading Israeli babies, raping Israeli women, kidnapping children, etc. Many of these claims of excesses have since been discredited. These “progressives” claim they sympathize with the Palestine people in their struggle against Israeli apartheid. But they then lecture that the Palestinians must conduct their struggle without violence or harm to “innocent Israeli civilians.”

It’s now clear that many of the civilian deaths were the result of the Israeli army itself firing into areas that were allegedly occupied by Palestinian fighters and their Israeli captives. Our “liberal” friends insist there is still a residue of Palestinian excess. But how could it be otherwise, considering how Zionists have treated the Palestinian people for the last 75+ years? Before October 7, there was the day before. Yet the so-called friends of the Palestinians insist we in the West must equally condemn Palestinian excesses, real or alleged, and Israel’s crimes. They want to support only a “pure” national liberation struggle without any “excesses.” In other words, they do not support any national liberation struggles at all!

They argue that today’s Palestinian liberation movement is dominated not by secular democrats like the Palestinian Liberation Organization of the past that fought for a secular democratic state for all of Palestine’s residents. The PLO’s program included the separation of church and state with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews to practice their respective religions. This is what these “friends” support as an alternative to Zionist apartheid with Judaism as the state religion.