US Presidential Election 2024

Trumps vice presidential candidate in a debate last night said that when Trump was in office, countries around the world were afraid of the US and that Russia would not have attacked Ukraine and Iran would not have launched missiles against Israel. What do you guys think?

Do Russian politicians see both the Republicans and Democrats as mortal enemies of Russia? I see some on this forum criticize the left in America but I don't think the right wing is any better.

However, the influential publication Politico has released an extensive article in which representatives of the intelligence services and the administration, with a straight face, claim that Iran is behind the assassination attempts on Trump , and that some mysterious Iranian killers, "inept but enthusiastic," are roaming the States, who want to take revenge on the ex-president for the murder of General Soleimani, but keep missing.

Peoples Dispatch interviewed Claudia De la Cruz, a socialist candidate running against both Trump and Harris, who as a third party candidate has faced her own challenges in running for office outside the two-party duopoly. De la Cruz directly referenced this attempt at voter purging in North Carolina. “It’s important for us to understand just how undemocratic this system is,” she said.

“We’ve received a lot of attacks from both the Republicans and the Democrats. The Democrats [are] attacking [us] even more,” she said, referring to the successful attempts by the Democratic Party to get De la Cruz’s name off the ballot in key election battleground states such as Pennsylvania. “We know that they are attacking third party candidates, and I would say even explicitly a socialist candidate, because people are tired and people are exhausted. And when people are tired and exhausted, they look for another alternative. They look for other options.”

“The real problem here is that you have one party with two names, and both of these sections of the ruling class are gaslighting, blackmailing and bribing our people into believing that they have to vote against their interests, against their values, and against what they understand to be their principles,” De la Cruz said.

Below is our interview with Dr. Jill Stein, running on the Green Party ticket alongside running mate Butch Ware. Stein’s platform has attracted many people who feel betrayed and disillusioned by the Democratic Party, including many Muslim and Arab Americans who are outraged for Harris’s role in US support for Israel.

The people of this country are facing multiple crises, seeing their tax dollars funding a grotesque genocide while they are unable to even be protected from fierce storms during hurricane season. Yet, instead of speaking to these very real crises, the Democrats have identified a different enemy, and that’s third party candidates.

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The Democrats had announced back in March that they hired an army of lawyers in order to throw their competitors off the ballot. And this is the party that pats itself on the back for being the representative of true democracy. (...) In addition, they have publicly advertised for infiltrators and spies to basically mess up our organizations on the ground, and our ballot drives. We suspected for a long time that that was going on, a sort of COINTELPRO-type interference. We finally found actual proof of that with the Democratic National Committee advertising for these hires.

In addition, they tied up our public funding, our matching funds, which made it very hard for us to get on all the ballots where we were counting on those resources to fund those drives.

Those are various ways that they try to shut us down. They blacklist us, you know, so that the media largely doesn’t cover us. What actually began to really open the doors to wider coverage was when they started smearing us with these really ludicrous smears that people really objected to. AOC, she recorded this really ridiculous Instagram video, which was so kind of self righteous, condescending, smug, telling me that I was a predatory candidate, because I’m not growing the party. Basically making the case that I disappear, except for every four years I come back and run for president, which is nonsense.

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Jamie Harrison, the head of the DNC, the chair who started smearing me again as a Russian asset, which has been completely laid to rest, an absurd charge which was investigated for three years by the Senate Intelligence Committee that disputed that rumor thoroughly, and laid that to rest. This is what the Democrats keep trying to do, and there have been several other smears, and now this actual advertisement.

kvs wrote:Trump's MAGA is about focusing on domestic production instead of following the globalist offshore imperial model.   US transnationals were supposed to rule the world but Trump and his followers have clued in that this is not happening.
Meanwhile the globalist vermin Democraps are trying to assert US primacy over the planet with all sorts of lunatic war plans, including a war on China.Under Trump, the black unemployment rate was the lowest in decades.

Trump’s devastation of the working class

At many points in his announcement speech, Trump positioned himself as the candidate of the US working class. In reality, as a billionaire real estate mogul himself and a promoter of policies catered towards the ultra-rich, Trump could not be more out of touch with working people.

“We will fight with every measure of our strength and with every ounce of our energy,” Trump proclaimed. “To lift up the working men and working women of America and to restore the fabric of this nation.”

As president, Trump implemented massive tax cuts for the wealthy in 2017, allowing many billionaires and corporations to pay lower taxes than working people. These “reforms” effectively transferred $2 trillion from workers to the ultra-rich.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) enforces labor law but has been historically skewed towards the bosses. Trump further weakened worker protections by overturning NLRB precedent to favor bosses, restricting where workers can organize and protest, among other policies.

Trump crusaded against raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 per hour. He made over eight million workers ineligible for overtime pay, costing them a total of $1 billion in stolen wages per year. Trump’s wave of deregulation made it easier for corporations to pollute the water and air. Soon after taking office he signed an executive order mandating that for every one regulation implemented, two must be revoked. Trump also slashed Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) resources, reducing the number of inspectors to an all-time low, depriving workers of needed job safety personnel.

“To every worker and family struggling to survive in the Biden economy with inflation destroying your family and your life, this campaign will be for you,” Trump said on Tuesday.

Trump’s presidency was also characterized by his genocidal handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, making the United States the unquestionable leader in terms of COVID-19 deaths at over one million. Trump had allegedly been made aware of the pandemic’s deadly nature as early as February 2020. At the same time, Trump’s administration was pursuing public health budget cuts, including a 15% cut to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which equaled $1.2 billion. Under his presidency, the CDC could not even prepare a proper COVID-19 test kit two months into the pandemic. Trump’s abject failure in distributing tests and PPE and providing incentives for workers to stay home and protect themselves against the disease, among other measures, devastated the US economy as infections and deaths skyrocketed far beyond all other countries in the world. All while Trump himself downplayed the seriousness of the virus, fueling a nationwide anti-public health movement that continues to plague the country.

Harris’ career in the upper echelons of the California criminal justice system is one of further entrenching the state’s reputation as one of the worst in terms of mass incarceration. According to the Prison Policy Institute, California’s incarceration rate of 494 per 100,000 people means that the state “locks up a higher percentage of its people than almost any democratic country on earth.”

As California’s Attorney General, Harris personally championed a harsh statewide truancy law that enabled highly punitive measures against parents whose children were not attending school. This law sought to make an example out of parents, who were often working people whose children could not attend school due to a variety of circumstances. These included a mother, Cheree Peoples, of Orange County, arrested and walked out of her home in her pajamas in front of cameras, whose daughter could not attend school regularly due to sickle cell anemia.

Her record as Vice President proved to be a continuation of her deep conservatism. Not only has she been a fierce supporter of Israel for her entire political career, but she has been just as complicit as “Genocide Joe” Biden in continuing the US’ policy of unconditional arming and funding of Israel as it carries out genocide in Gaza.

A headline from the Wall Street Journal from 2020, when Kamala joined Biden’s presidential campaign reads “As Harris Joins Biden Ticket, Wall Street Exhales in Relief.” Her key supporters throughout her political career have indeed been the rich and powerful, with the “social and legal elites” of San Francisco funding her first campaign to become the city’s District Attorney. Her popularity with the upper classes continued, with billionaires bankrolling her bid for president in 2020.

In response to Biden’s endorsement of Harris, Claudia De la Cruz, a socialist running for president against both Biden and Trump on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, wrote, “Let’s remember Kamala may be a Black woman, but class interests matter! She has contributed to the mass incarceration of our Black and brown people and has been complicit of genocide. She isn’t kin nor is she a sister of working women!”

Below is our interview with Dr. Jill Stein, running on the Green Party ticket