by Jeff Mackler, published on Socialist Action, September 16, 2024
The two multi-billionaire-backed, 2024 presidential candidates faced off before some 67 million ABC-TV viewers on September 10. The pollsters recorded that Democrat Kamala Harris handily “won” the debate by a 66-34 margin. The New York Times’ fact checkers found that Republican Donald Trump lied or distorted facts 33 times; Harris made but one slightly inaccurate statement, said The Times, a Harris supporter, the next day.
In truth, both candidates lied by omission, as is the norm with all capitalist elections. Indeed, whoever is elected, the fundamental decisions that govern the capitalist state’s affairs are made, not on national television, but behind the scenes, in the leading corporate boardrooms where the nation’s elite assign their representatives to craft the annual $7 trillion 4,000 page US budget that guarantees their interests. These include annual $trillions for the war machine and the US “national security state,” enormous corporate tax gifts achieved by a few silent pen strokes in the tax codes that no one sees, and, when times are a bit tough for the elite, massive cuts in social programs for the poor and working people that are shifted to the ruling class coffers.
At $10 billion, a mere trifle when multiple $trillions are at stake for the candidates’ corporate backers, the 2024 election expenditures exceeded the record 2020 total of $8 billion. All working class candidates are for all practical purposes excluded. Even “left” capitalist reformers like Jill Stein (Greens) and Cornel West (“independent”) are mostly eased off the ballot one way or another. Under capitalism it cannot be otherwise.
Harris and Trump presented their masters’ manufactured reality, distilled for 90 minutes via the corporate-owned media, pretending that whoever wins will be capable of making important changes for US workers. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Harris brags of US military’s dominant “Lethal” power
A clever, well-prepared Harris, sequestered and coached by experts for five days before the debate, stunned more than a few when she momentarily bypassed her assigned podium to offer a handshake to the surprised proto-fascist racist rhetoric spouting Trump before the debate began. As if to say, “I am a strong Black woman fully capable of leading the world’s most lethal capitalist imperialist power and I am here tonight to beat your lying, pompous racist ass,” Harris did just that!
“Lethal” was her chosen debate term, referring to the US military-industrial complex, making clear in that single word that she was fully prepared to rain death and destruction, crippling sanctions, endless wars of intervention and occupation, drone wars, special operation wars and assassination wars on any country that threatened US imperial interests.
Harris promised to be a strong president indeed. She lent zero quarter to her dwindling liberal/left supporters, who pleaded beforehand that she espouse a modicum of separation from the ongoing genocidal Palestine Gaza and West Bank policies of her now almost disappeared boss Genocide Joe Biden. Harris made certain to assure her imperial backers of her absolute fealty to Zionist Israel’s ongoing wars in the Middle East, the US proxy war in Ukraine against Russia and beyond. She also made clear that she would place no obstacles to the trillion dollar US fossil fuel industry’s profits and especially to their massive and deadly fracking operations that made US corporations a few years ago the greatest natural gas exporters in the world. Indeed, behind the US-backed fascist-led 2014 coup that overthrew the pro-Russian elected Ukrainian government was US imperialism’s key objective – to substitute its now massive fracked natural gas reserves for Russia’s, at the time the world’s leading fossil fuel Nord Stream pipeline supplier to Europe.
Beyond Harris’s brief warmongering outburst she chose silence – silence on the just allocated $10 billion more to the Israel war machine, silence of the $trillion US annual military budget that supports 1100 US military bases in 110 countries, silence on the US deadly economic sanctions imposed on 43 countries – Silence! Silence! Silence! Her chosen word, “LETHAL,” was sufficient to make absolutely clear that Harris was no newcomer to US imperialist politics and practice.
Blustering Trump
Meanwhile, the blustering, name-calling, perpetually lying, ego-maniacal, racist Donald Trump insisted during the debate that US imperialist politics could be reduced to the exercise of his personal diplomacy or relations with this or that international figure. He boasted that as president he had sent “the head of the Taliban” in Afghanistan, “Abdul,” [He couldn’t remember the name Abdul Ghani Baradar.] a photo of the Taliban leader’s house, as an incentive to reach a negotiated US withdrawal agreement. The implication was clear, that if the Taliban leader refused the US terms his house and family would be bombed to smithereens. That the 20-year failed US war against Afghanistan cost $2.6 trillion in Pentagon spending, after deploying more than 120,000 US troops at the highpoint of the war – half of them US-financed via Blackwater and other privatized mercenary and war crimes committing forces accountable to no one – was omitted from Trump’s 30 second ABC moronic debate monologue. That 470,000 direct and indirect Afghan civilians were killed and 2,442 US troops dead and another 20,666 wounded was also omitted. That Afghanistan, among the poorest nations on earth, having defeated the most powerful nation ever to exist and is once again free of foreign invaders, was also absent from Trump’s utterances.
Neither Trump nor Harris cared to relate to ABC’s 67 million viewers that the US imperialist objectives in Afghanistan included the establishment of US military bases with nuclear weapons on Russia’s border as well as Russia’s future dismemberment. The US taking control of Afghanistan’s massive lithium resources also went unmentioned. Trump did whine that Biden’s “hasty US withdrawal,” after 20 years of US slaughter, left behind some $80 billion in US arms.
I will only add that President Biden’s post-Afghan War remark, today acceded to by Harris and Trump, that the entire war was a US “mistake” should suffice for all sane and decent people to reject support to any and all capitalist parties and candidates.
Trump’s disgusting braggadocio aside, he inadvertently revealed a subordinate aspect of US imperialist policy, that is, its diplomats periodically and privately inform US opponents of the dire consequences to be expected if US capitalist interests are threatened. We should also add that win or lose with regard to all US wars, the few corporations that oversee and dominate the largely monopolized US military-industrial complex always win! War is always good for their profits!
Harris one-ups Trump on Immigration
Anticipating a Trump focus on immigration policy, a well prepared Harris slammed Trump early on for rejecting her administration’s reactionary bi-partisan immigration bill that exceeded in racist anti-immigrant border measures anything ever proposed by Trump himself. Biden’s proposed bill, aimed at undermining Trump’s rightwing electoral support, included the addition of another 1500 border patrol agents to be assigned to keep Latin America’s poverty stricken poor from entering the US.
But Trump blithely ignored Harris’s telling reactionary blows and countered with the inane “Millions of immigrants” are entering the US including and especially “their criminals, mental institution patients, drug dealers, rapists, and worse.” “In Springfield, Ohio,” said Trump, “immigrants are eating people’s dogs and cats… our pets,” he repeatedly blared, even after the ABC’s debate moderator cited Springfield officials’ public refutation of Trump’s claim.
Harris merely looked on with a fixed contemptuous smile, having made her point that her administration had far exceeded Trump’s racist immigrant policies with concrete legislation that Trump had ordered his Republican congressional followers to kill!
The truth behind US immigration policy
That the central explanation for the rise in immigrants “illegally” entering the US was the US imperialist destruction of the economies of many Latin American countries, including the instigation of military coups and installed dictators, massive corporate theft of land and natural resources, the imposition of devastating economic sanctions, embargoes and blockades, went unmentioned. The multi-billionaire racist Trump charge that “They’re eating dogs and cats,” aimed at dehumanizing the poor and oppressed of the world; it demonstrated that he was incapable of even the minimum of human compassion and understanding that starving people anywhere – today in Gaza and/or anywhere else in the world – will eat virtually anything to survive!
US capitalists need cheap immigrant labor
Neither Trump nor Harris were capable of revealing the overriding truth that US capitalists are the prime beneficiaries of the super-exploited, often below minimum wage immigrant Latin American workers who are hired in the millions to work at usually below poverty wages in the multi-billion dollar agro-industrial industry and elsewhere in the low wage almost always non-union highly monopolized capitalist economic sectors.
The “moron” Trump, a term privately coined by his former Secretary of State and Exxon Mobil CEO Ross Tillerson when Trump advocated increasing the US store of tactical nuclear weapons 100 fold, could only blurt out that “Venezuela has the lowest crime rate in the world.” Trump implied that this was the case because Venezuela had expelled its criminals to the US! Trump and Harris were silent on the fact that a United Nations report indicated that the US-imposed illegal sanctions against Venezuela resulted in the starvation of 50,000 of its people and the devastation of its economy.
The right to abortion
Harris was well prepared to take on Trump’s defense of the reactionary 2022 US Supreme Court decision abolishing the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling of a half century ago. His lying rants repeatedly insisted that the court’s shifting the right to abortion to the states was supported by virtually everyone. While Harris prevailed on this issue, as with others, she offered no explanation why every Democratic Party administration, even when Democrats controlled both houses of congress and the presidency, failed to approve federal legislation that guaranteed the right of women to control their bodies. The same with the Democrat’s near 50-year failure to overturn the reactionary Hyde Amendment that largely bans the use of federal funds (Medicare and Medicaid) for abortion. Before Hyde some 300,000 women, mostly poor and minority, used federal funds for abortion. After Hyde the figure dropped to near zero!
Racism is profitable in capitalist America
The Harris-Trump debate tragically affirmed that both ruling class parties are compelled to scapegoat the poor and oppressed the world over. In the US, every form of discrimination is employed to deflect attention from the inherent consequences of a capitalist economic system that is based on the exploitation of human labor for profit. Pitting one section of the working class against another – Black, Latinx and Native American against white, immigrant against citizens, documented against undocumented, legal against “illegal,” men against women and the LGBTQI community – is the capitalist norm. Today, increasingly, Fortune 500 corporations “employ” some millions of near slave labor prisoners in the increasingly privatized for profit prisoner-industrial complex. All of the above norms are necessities for any and all capitalists if they are to remain profitable in the inherently competitive US and world marketplace. Needless to say socialists reject any and all such reactionary discriminatory polices. With regard to the Harris-Trump racist immigrant policies we demand, “Open the borders!,” “No human being is illegal!” and “Full rights and citizenship for all!”
Capitalism’s multiple crises
Capitalism’s deadly drive to counter the inherent pressures of declining profits in the face of this ever-intensifying US and worldwide competition, is central to the explanation of why the US rate of unionization today stands at an historic 100-year low. It explains why both Trump and Biden/Harris impose the same tariffs on Chinese and other nations’ competitive products even if the result is higher prices for US workers. It explains why both capitalist parties are united in opposing any increase in the federal minimum wage while corporations are free to raise prices with abandon. It explains why women workers are still paid significantly less than men and why deadly fossil fuel production, especially Harris’s now backed fracking, is increasing, not decreasing. That US military spending is always on the rise while social service expenditures are constantly on the cutting block was also absent from the debate.
Both Harris and Trump are the current choices of a crisis-ridden US capitalist elite whose profits are in constant decline and who are compelled to find solutions at the expense of workers everywhere.
Trump did score one debater’s point for sure when he countered Harris’s new current string of social spending campaign promises with the simple retort, “Why haven’t you done so over the past three and a half years?” But Trump failed to mention that his own administration, 2016-2020, fared no better.
Working people have zero interest in supporting any capitalist candidate or party. “Lesser evil” politics has proven to be the graveyard of all fighting social movements. The future of humanity lies with the capacity of working people to build our own independent mass fighting organizations capable of challenging capitalist rule at the point of production and in the political arena.
Might we conclude now that the September 10 Harris-Trump “debate” was devoid of any serious solutions to the myriad of ever-intensifying social and economic catastrophes confronting all working people and their allies among the oppressed and exploited? If you are interested in fighting for real solutions, join us! Join Socialist Action! socialistaction.org
*Featured Image: Credit ~AFP via Getty Images
Jeff Mackler is the National Secretary of Socialist Act. He is a member of the Administrative Committee of the United National Antiwar Coalition; a National Steering Committee member of Assangedefense.org and Director of The Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal in Northern California