Tag: history

The Coming Election: I’m Sitting This One Out

Just this morning I received an appeal from a colleague of mine at OpEdNews where I’m a senior editor. He begged those on his mailing list to please vote for Kamala Harris. He said that allowing Donald Trump to be elected would be disastrous not only for the United States, but for the world. So, please, please vote for the sitting Vice President.

Believe me, I completely understand where my friend is coming from. I too dread the thought of four more years of yet another Trump presidency. For that reason, I’d never vote for him. Neither would I ever vote for a Republican. They’re just too much in the pockets of our country’s richest 1%.

However, I’ve come to realize that the same has become true for the Democrats. They too serve the interests of that same 1%. They’re just Republican Lite. With their colleagues across the aisle, they’ve formed a kind of Uni-Party.  

I mean, like the Republicans, the Democrats have shown that they don’t really care about working people, except at election time. The Blues like the Reds care only about their donors.

Think about it: neither party gives a damn about what you or I think concerning Palestinians, raising the minimum wage, fairly taxing the rich and corporations, universal health care, free college tuition, homelessness, cancellation of debt for college graduates, gun legislation, nuclear arms control, closing federal lands to oil interests, a green New Deal, repairing our country’s collapsing infrastructure, high-speed rail, or solving the root problems of immigration. The list goes on. Yes, Democrats sometimes pay lip service to such issues. But that’s about as far as it goes.

Moreover, Democratic foreign policy is indistinguishable from the Republicans. There’s hardly a sliver of difference between them on Israel, Ukraine, or China. Nothing about diplomacy and its inherent need for compromise. Instead, for both parties, foreign policy has been reduced to three elements. Everyone must follow U.S. directives or face bombing, sanctions, and/or regime change. That’s it! Bombing, sanctions, and regime change.

(To give him his due however, at least Donald Trump has promised to end the Ukraine nonsense – the issue that has overridden everything else for the Biden presidency since 2022. Since that time, the U.S. has spent more than $175 billion on Ukraine. $175 billion!!  That’s enough to solve all the problems listed above. But all the while Democrats have joined Republicans in claiming that there’s not enough money for addressing those issues  – not even for FEMA in the wake of Helene and Milton.)

What I’m saying is America has become a failed state. Its system is not worth participating in. Bent on having our 4.5% of the world’s population controlling the entire thing, it’s completely corrupt. Moreover, completely controlled by money and the military industrial complex, it can’t be reformed. Even if Democrats wanted to address the problems listed above, the Republicans would never let them. Realizing this, instead of owning their working-class identity, the former have decided to become more like the latter. Republican Lite! The result is a completely frozen irreformable system.

And don’t tell me that we can vote ourselves out of this mess. Again, the system won’t let us. I mean, no one’s even talking about eliminating the Electoral College, are they? So, we keep getting “leaders” unsupported by the country’s majority. Seven “swing states” determine the whole thing reducing the rest of us to mere spectators. We’re left wondering which sock puppet the voters in Ohio, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania will choose. I live in Connecticut, a solidly blue state. Why should I vote? It’s all a charade.

But here let me slow down. None of what I’ve written so far represents my decisive reason for sitting out this election. It’s simply this: I CAN’T VOTE FOR GENOCIDERS.

Can you?

For me it’s a moral issue. I just can’t do it anymore than I could have voted for that mustached man in Germany nearly a century ago.

For me, apartheid is non-negotiable. Settler colonialism is non-negotiable. But above all, GENOCIDE IS NON-NEGOTIABLE. I can’t support any government committing genocide. And that’s what a Harris presidency promises to continue. So will a Trump presidency.

End of discussion.

But who knows? Perhaps a Trump victory will at last cause Democrats to ask themselves why. It might drive them to realize that Republican Lite doesn’t cut it for working people. It might lead Democrats to unabashedly become the party of Roosevelt’s New Deal, of election reform, higher wages, universal health care, a Green New Deal, just taxation, loan forgiveness, defunding Israel’s genocide, nuclear disarmament, and enlightened immigration policy (that connects asylum seekers with failed U.S. policies such as the War on Drugs and the North American Free Trade Agreement).

Don’t hold your breath though. And buckle up. It’s going to be a rough ride.

Immigrants Are Everywhere And They’re Demanding Reparations; They’ll Replace Us; And They Should!

Last week my wife and I spent three days in Venice. For me it was a return visit.

Fifty-two years ago, I traveled there twice with a very dear friend. So, this time round brought back a flood of happy memories.

My 2024 visit was highlighted by hours spent at the Biennale art exhibition in and near the city’s Arsenale Gardens. It’s theme was “Stranieri Ovunque” (Foreigners Everywhere).

The displayed sculptures, paintings, films, fabrics, and other objets d’art celebrated rather than lamented the planet-wide population exchanges we’re all witnessing. The displays elicited deep reflections on contemporary debate about immigrants, borders, and attempts to keep “foreigners” out of Europe and the United States.

It all made me think not only about immigration, but about colonialism and reparations.

On the one hand, across the entire world we’re witnessing seemingly irresistible waves of immigrants traveling from the global south to Europe and the United States. On the other hand, those former colonial powers are contesting such movements in the name of preserving their (predominantly white) cultures and economies from foreign invaders.

The colonial powers are worried about being “replaced” in their own countries.

Attempts at preservation evoke restrictive measures such as laws, walls and increased militarization of borders. They also involve propaganda campaigns that villainize immigrants from the former colonies as invaders, criminals, and agents of economic destruction bent on taking jobs from their working-class victims.

More specifically, the propaganda would have e.g., “Americans” believe that immigrants cause their economic problems such as unemployment, job loss, and lower wages. Such reasoning has it that in our 2024 population of 350 million people, U.S. economic problems are created by 12 million of the poorest people in the world seeking refuge across “our” sacred borders. 12 million is about 3.4% of 350 million. Economically speaking, that’s an insignificant percentage – especially when those involved have virtually zero political power.

So, the concern immigration raises is not only absurd, it also misdirects public attention from the real causes not only of our economic problems and of immigration itself. Those causes include colonialism and capitalism with its practice of offshoring the very jobs that once created a prospering middle class in Europe and the United States. In other words, current economic problems are and have always been caused by the richest people among us rather than by the poorest.

More precisely, it’s all associated with colonialism – i.e. with the centuries’ long practice of western Europeans invading and plundering the homelands of those now seen as threatening Europe and the United States.

Recall that the last 500 years have seen “westerners” migrating to the Global South (Africa, Latin America, and South Asia), stealing its land and treasures, and enslaving its peoples while often taking up residence and in the process destroying economies, cultures, indigenous art, and languages.

The further result has been the creation of “underdeveloped” countries whose purloined wealth fueled the economic development of Europeans inhabiting lands (like England) that are by comparison small, resource poor and sparsely populated.

Additionally, the industrial “development” supported by the colonial system has caused an unprecedented warming of the environment that has taken its worst toll in the Global South. There formerly productive agricultural land has been robbed of its fertility by the resultant changes in temperature and rainfall as well as by forest fires.

The very existence of entire island nations is threatened by rising sea levels caused by global warming.

Likewise, invading capitalists drove peasants from their subsistence milpas and small farms through colonial practices that precisely ignored property lines and borders while often redrawing them altogether.

Additionally, “foreign aid” in the form of food giveaways and subsidies to giant agricultural firms consistently made it impossible for small indigenous farmers to compete with their invaders from the north. How can a local farmer sell her crops in the face of “foreign aid” (dumping) whose very purpose is to drive her out of business?

And when local populations tried to remedy such problems by electing governments to meet their own needs rather than those of their exploiters, the latter either initiated regime change or directly fought wars against them — all to reverse people-centered programs in the name of fighting socialism and communism.

So now the shoe’s on the other foot. Floods of people from Latin America, Africa, and South Asia are returning the favor. Whether they’re conscious of it or not, they’re voting with their feet to demand reparations for the wealth the colonialists stole from them.

In other words, whether to give reparations for the plunder of colonialism is not up to the colonizers to decide. The exploited are at our doorstep to take back what was unjustly stolen. They are the deciders.

And there’s no stopping them. You can pass all the laws you want. You can build your walls.

You can militarize your borders.

But those we’ve wronged are still going to come. And they’ll bring their languages, clothing, foods, religions, music, art, and large families.

The Great Replacement is inevitable. The Great Replacement is just. It’s karma. The chickens are coming home to roost.

What goes around comes around.

The earth belongs to everyone!