Anyone who has been watching the election circus knows that this has been the most openly vicious election in recent US history.
Trump has repeatedly called for locking up his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and has implied that she should be assassinated.
He has said that he won’t accept the results of the elections if he doesn’t win. He refuses to back down and this has caused more than a few of his followers to speculate on civil war if he loses.
This venom and fighting has everything to do with deep divisions between those at the top of the ruling class about the best way to run their empire.
These divisions are sure to sharpen in the days after the elections — whatever happens on Tuesday, we don’t expect a respite from the animus that has polarized the country on a terrible basis.
In times like these, those who actually represent the interests of humanity can grow to influence many, many more people.
The baseless suspicions that James Comey, the head of the FBI and a Trump supporter, brought against Hillary Clinton in the last days was an unprecedented political maneuver to impact the outcome of the election. Even while the FBI has not re-opened the investigation or changed their conclusion about their investigation, the head of a major governmental department using their position of power to attempt to influence who becomes president is entirely unacceptable and is only the most visible display of the ruling class being at each other’s throats.
At this point, anything can happen — but one thing is certain.
Donald Trump is an open fascist who could become Commander in Chief of the empire. This is a very dangerous situation.
We know about dangerous regimes — having come together in 2005 around the mission to Drive Out The Bush Regime.
And we have to say that as bad as Bush was, Donald Trump’s demonization of Muslims and immigrants and his open hatred of women goes even beyond the Bush Regime.
While Bush and Obama have both presided over a system of mass incarceration, criminalization, demonization and police murder of black and brown people, Trump has advocated for a storm trooper version of “law and order” in the inner cities and among immigrants, bringing back the racist and unconstitutional “Stop and Frisk,” gestapo-like patrol of the police that would go door to door rounding up immigrants, and “some form of punishment” for women who have abortions.
Bush and Obama both made unprecedented attacks on whistleblowers, yet Trump takes this further by expressing open contempt for the press, especially if they aren’t speaking about him in a way that he finds favorable.
We are told that to stop Donald Trump we must vote for Hillary Clinton. But this is not a solution. There are two reasons:
1. The Democrats have never called out the fascists within the core of the ruling class and every step of the way have sought common ground & compromise with the hard-core right wing of the Republican Party.
They themselves have pledged to respect the results of the election if Trump wins. Clinton has never attacked Trump’s essential legitimacy, even while he has continued to attack her.
She touts her qualifications to be commander in chief as someone who is able to seek common ground and work with the neo-cons. Joe Biden himself said on CNN about Trump, “If he wins, I’ll extend a hand. He would be president of the United States. Period.”
Clinton’s criticism of Trump is based on him being too unstable to defend the bloody interests of empire and unable to hold together the myth that “America Is Good,” while residing over a system rooted in exploitation and oppression that is far from “good” (we suggest: The Democrats Have Already Said They Will Accept a Trump Election as Legitimate. What Does That Mean? And What Must We Do? from Revolution newspaper).
2. Clinton has decades of experience as a tool for the empire that is killing the planet and its people.
Just last Friday, she wouldn’t even pay lip service to the Standing Rock water protectors, and her national campaign headquarters refused to even accept a letter from a Native American youth delegation from Standing Rock — instead, they had the youth bum rushed by dozens of New York City police.
She stands firmly against the Native Americans at Standing Rock who are not only defending the lives of the people there but are standing up against centuries of genocide against Native people and drawing a line in the sand against the destruction of the environment.
Clinton’s promise to extend the legacy of Obama should be taken as a guarantee of expanding the endless war on the world. No less than the former president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai (a former cheerleader for the US occupation) said this week in the Washington Post:
“Just show me one example of a bombing that has taken Afghanistan one step closer to peace. Fifteen years on, do we have more Taliban or less, more radicalization or less, more terror or less? Is this really a war against terror, or is it something else in which the lives of Afghans don’t matter?”
Carl Dix wrote in Why I am Not Voting in This Election and Why You Shouldn’t Either, But Why I will Defend The Right of Black and Other Oppressed People’s Right To Vote!
Clinton is a proven war criminal. In the 1990’s, her husband’s administration, in which she played a key role, imposed sanctions on Iraq that caused the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. She called this acceptable collateral damage. She brags about her role in the toppling of the government of Libya, which led to the deaths of many thousands and the further growth of reactionary Islamic jihadism. From the ’90s till now, she’s loudly backed up Israel in every single move of aggression against the Palestinian people. In the 1990’s, she called Black youth “super predators” who needed to be “brought to heel” and she supported flooding the streets with 100,000 cops and taking away legal rights from defendants. These moves more than doubled the number of people in prison from a little less than a million to over two million! That’s something that Donald Trump could be and would be proud of —and he was back then, even praising Hillary Clinton and calling Bill Clinton a great president back in 2008—before these “thieves fell out.” She is a monster who brags about her blood-soaked expertise to be the commander in chief of this empire. And to boot, she’s refused to call out Trump for what he is—a goddamn racist-fascist—and has said that she’ll respect the results if the fascist wins!
The truth is this: whoever wins will shed whatever blood it takes to serve this system, to keep this capitalist-imperialist global empire in effect—here and around the world. Clinton and Trump are criminal choices of a criminal system, and people need to reject them both.
This line from our Call to Drive Out The Bush Regime still rings true:
“There is not going to be some savior from the Democratic Party. This whole idea of putting our hopes and energies into “leaders” who tell us to seek common ground with fascists and religious fanatics is proving every day to be a disaster, and actually serves to demobilize people.”
Donald Trump has been agitating his followers to intimidate Black people, immigrants, and other people of color and to suppress their right to vote. And so far at least one armed fascist group has responded.
While we reject the criminal choices of a criminal system, we also reject the notion that certain sections of people be denied the right to vote because of their skin color, gender or sexual orientation.
Carl Dix goes on to write:
In an unprecedented move, Trump has refused to agree to accept the results of the election, asserting that the only way he could lose is if massive voter fraud stole the election from him. And he has called on his supporters to go into and “monitor” polling places in Chicago, Cleveland, Phoenix, and Detroit—i.e., cities with large numbers of Black and Latino people, as well as people from countries with large numbers of Muslims. This comes down to calling the dogs into the street against Black people, against immigrant citizens, against anyone whose skin isn’t white. And a number of fascist groups have taken up this call and are organizing to go to the polls to intimidate people on election day.
This kind of voter intimidation has a long ugly history in this country. Black and Latino people fought and died for the right to vote—up against threats, lynchings, KKK terror, and persisting down to today’s voter ID laws, which disproportionately target Black people and other people of color. Donald Trump now revives this and threatens to take it to a whole other place.
We can’t let shit like this go down.
Any attempt to take away people’s basic rights, like the right to vote, not only insults and denies their humanity, it comes down to trying to beat down and degrade them so far that they could never raise their heads. If this foul plan succeeds, it will further fuel the fascist forces who want to see Black people back in slave chains or dead, immigrants out of the country, and other “minorities” “in their places.” On the other hand, if we beat this back, if we reach out and win support in all kinds of places as we do, if we make clear that this is not part of keeping the world as it is but fighting for a whole new world through revolution, then we can turn this attack around.
We call on everyone to call out and fight any attempt to deny or restrict the rights of Black people and other oppressed people to vote.
And beyond the elections, to stand up against attacks on basic human rights, attacks on black people, immigrants and women, the destruction of the environment and the wars for empire being waged beyond the world.
Another line of our Call to Drive Out The Bush Regime rings true:
“That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn – or be forced – to accept.”
There are big changes happening in this country and in the world that could force many people to confront the reality of what America is really about.
Now is the time to speak to the thousands who could lead millions to act in the interest of humanity and the planet.
Bring this message to election-watching parties, or host your own. Use Tuesday as an opportunity to challenge those around you to put humanity and the planet first.
What you can do:
1. Write a letter to the editor – use our tool to automatically locate and send your letter to your favorite (or least favorite) newspaper.
Click here to write a letter >
2. Observe what’s happening in your area now through Tuesday. Save the World Can’t Wait national office phone number and call us with any reports of repression or attempts to intimidate people against voting or carry out violence against people.
Save World Can’t Wait’s phone number: (646) 807-3259
3. Share this image below. When you hear friends and family say “I voted” with pride, let them know you’re proud also — of being part of a community of resistance to the crimes of this government. Let people know they can join in putting humanity and the planet first too!
