April 9, 2024
( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Israel’s
political and military leaders have produced so many outright lies regarding
Gaza and Hamas that it might seem there is no point in wasting one’s breath on
them. Consider the following statements and the contrary evidence for those not
yet convinced:
The IDF does not deliberately target
civilians, journalists, medical facilities and staff, or restricts aid. In
fact, the IDF has deliberately targeted civilians (as widely reported),
journalists (as Human Rights Watch has detailed), and medical personnel
(according to Amnesty International). It has also put various restrictions on
aid.
The United Nations Relief and Works
Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is harboring among its
employees Hamas militants who took part in the October 7 massacres. Yet, Israel
has not shared any information or evidence to back up its assertions while
UNRWA has screened its 13,000 staff in Gaza on a biannual basis.
Israel’s declared war on Gaza and the
ongoing, undeclared war against Palestinians in the West Bank are “against
Hamas” and “terrorists.” In fact, multiple Israeli governments, including the
current one, have committed to appropriating all Palestinian territory and
committing genocide against the Palestinians currently living there.
Iran is the main financier and
supporter of Hamas. In fact, other entities like Qatar have been the main
supporters of Hamas, and Israel too was instrumental in creating Hamas to
divide Palestinian sympathies.
Other statements, however, made by
Israeli and other world leaders, that may appear to be true, and that continue
to be taken at face value, are in reality dangerously deceptive. Their aim is
to justify Israeli politics regarding violence towards Palestinians, actions in
support of the current war, or inaction in stopping it. Careful examination of
a few of these will expose the ways in which such statements operate.
Dictionary of Deception
Probably the most repeated statement
proffered by Israeli politicians and their supporters is that Hamas and
Palestinians in general deny the Israeli state’s “right to exist.” This
statement entirely ignores—and diverts attention away from—the unquestionable
reality that Israel has existed as a state since 1948 and continues to exist,
whether or not Hamas or anyone else objects to it.
At the same time, the Israeli
complaint occludes the reality that it is Palestine whose right to exist as a
state has long been denied. Although the majority of world governments have
recognized Palestinian statehood, the State of Palestine has only an observer
status in the UN. This is so because Israel and the United States, Canada,
Australia, and an absolute majority of
European states have refused to recognize Palestinian statehood (though
this might change in future). Israel’s current government has explicitly and
loudly proclaimed that it has no plan to recognize a Palestinian state. It is,
thus, Israel that denies any Palestinian state’s right to exist.
Instead, Israel is expanding the
occupation of Palestinian territory, and when faced with resistance, it asserts
its own “right to self-defense.” However, in 1983, the UN General Assembly
explicitly affirmed Palestinians’ right to self-defense “by all available
means, including armed struggle,” a right they share with all nations under
“colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation,” as asserted in the
Geneva Conventions. This right does not include violence against Israeli
civilians, which Hamas militants have perpetrated. Such violence may qualify as
war crimes. Nevertheless, the Geneva Conventions make clear that the “right to
self-defense” belongs to the occupied, not the occupier. Any military or police
action taken by an occupier against the occupied—even when the occupied uses
violence against occupation—is violence, not self-defense.
Another instance of Israeli deception
can be seen in Israeli politicians’ regular insistence that Palestinian schools
teach their children to hate Jews. UNRWA—the main sponsor of education in the
West Bank and Gaza—was accused of spreading incitement of violence and hatred
of Jews in their textbooks. However, the European Union review of Palestinian
schoolbooks has concluded that they include “a strong focus on human
rights…express a narrative of resistance within the context of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and…display an antagonism towards Israel.” None of
this equates to hatred of Jews. The accusation of Palestinian schoolbooks
spreading hatred is also debunked by The European Middle East Project.
The EU report further notes that
textbooks produced by Israeli authorities removed “entire chapters on regional
and Palestinian history”, which “fundamentally changes the [Palestinian]
national narrative.” Israeli state school books often simply ignore the
Palestinian presence, and perpetually depict Israel and Jews as victims of
Palestinian and Arab enemy.
No wonder, then, that Israeli girls
sing about the annihilation of Gaza on an online Israeli TV program, and
Israeli soldiers in Gaza make videos broadcasting their mocking, humiliation,
and killing of Palestinian civilians as well as their destruction or looting of
Palestinian property. These soldiers are not necessarily right-wing Zionists
like some of the Jewish citizens blocking aid to Gaza or trying to build houses
within Gaza’s borders. Nor are they necessarily the Jewish settlers from the
West Bank. Many of them are just ordinary citizens. But in their ordinariness,
they provide a frightening and accurate picture of Israeli society’s general
views of Palestinians. This is why a majority of Israeli citizens support the
genocide in Gaza even if they do not support Israel’s prime minister and his
government.
Finally, contrary to their lament of
“grave concern” for “suffering in Gaza,” and their often self-serving
statements, politicians outside Israel are far from powerless to stop the
bloodshed in Gaza. Even within the classical diplomatic arsenal, individual
states can expel Israel’s ambassadors and recall their own. They can impose
sanctions or boycott Israeli businesses, politicians, cultural and sports
representatives (as they have done, with vigor, with regard to Russia and
Russians). They can stop their arms exports to Israel, sever economic
relations, and multiply their financial support for humanitarian organizations
operating in Gaza (rather than cutting that support). Only a handful of states
have actually recalled their ambassadors from Israel. No Western state is among
them, and except Bahrain, no other rich Arab state.
How can it be that the people who have
demonstrated endlessly in support of Palestinians—and have identified and urged
many of these measures—know more than powerful heads of state about strategies
to stop the genocide?
The answer, of course, is that
governments do know. And that reality brings us to some hard truths.
Hard Truths
Palestinians have no friends among
Western governments. They have known this hard truth for a long time, and their
knowledge has been confirmed in a most dreadful way. Even though a few European
countries (like Spain and Ireland) have used very sharp language against
Israel, they have taken no steps that would protect the lives of Palestinians
in Gaza and in the West Bank. The United States and a few Western governments
have bragged that they have imposed (travel and banking) sanctions on a few
Jewish settlers and settlements. But this is a ludicrous substitute for
effective action. Some Western leaders and governments now face court cases,
brought by pro-Palestinian human rights organizations and lawyers, charging
that they have violated both domestic and international laws by supporting
Israel’s genocide in Gaza (by supplying of ammunition to Israel), or by their
failures to stop it. But, thus far, judicial interventions have not brought
effective protections to the victims of genocide.
Palestinians also do not have friends
among Arab governments, nor should they expect any. Their “Arab brothers” have
expressed “deep concerns” about the Palestinian plight, but they have other,
more important concerns, such as importing Israeli surveillance technology to
keep checks on political opponents. Saudi Arabia, who long held to a policy of
linking normalization with Israel to Israel’s recognition of the Palestinian
state, now speaks only about a “path to Palestinian statehood.”
This means that Palestinians need
their own new political force to achieve both formal recognition of statehood
and peace with Israel. Are either of these two goals feasible? For now, there
is no sign that various Palestinian factions will achieve unity, which is an
absolutely necessary precondition to any long-term, sustainable Palestinian
state. Hamas and Fatah have held numerous talks to no avail. Clearly, it is not
easy to reconcile secular and Islamist worldviews, ideas of governance and
ideals of societal relations. Even various Islamist factions do not see eye to
eye. But without such unity, prior to the end of genocide and occupation,
post-genocide and post-occupation Palestine will descend into internal violence
and struggle for power. As for peace with Israel, the state of affairs in
twentieth-century post-genocide societies does not offer grounds for much
optimism. Genocides do not destroy only people, their cultures, and their
histories. They destroy hope and imagination, too, which are necessities for
building peace.
Israel, too, needs a new political
force to build a totally new national narrative based on language from a
dictionary very different from the dictionary of deception. The Israeli
public’s overwhelming support of the destruction of Gaza, occupation of the
West Bank, and expansion of settlements means that creating such a new
political force and language could take generations, if ever. Still, it is
possible to imagine that one day an Israeli public that is currently supporting
the annihilation of Gaza may begin asking itself: “How has a state created to
give hope to survivors of genocide turned into a perpetrator of genocide? What
have I given my voice to and what have I been silent about?”
Unless and until this happens, there
is no hope for either Israel or Palestine. Nor for the world within which all
of us exist.
Arvind
Dilawar
In
light of the United States’ continued financial support for Israel amid its
ongoing genocide in Gaza, antiwar organizations say they’ve received a surge of
interest from U.S. taxpayers considering tax resistance as a form of protest.
“The
office has received more calls and emails and orders for war tax resistance
materials than in years,” Ruth Benn, an organizer with the War Resisters
League, tells Truthout.
Founded
in the aftermath of forced enlistment during World War I, the War Resisters
League is under an umbrella of organizations that belong to the National War
Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC), which educates taxpayers across
the United States about the reality of military funding and various methods of
resistance.
As
the April 15 deadline for filing annual income tax returns approaches, the War
Resisters League and NWTRCC say they’re seeing a spike in traffic to their
online resources, calls and correspondence for more information, orders for
educational material and requests for guided workshops on tax resistance.
“I
Felt Morally Compelled”
One
of the many activists engaging in tax resistance because of U.S. support for
the genocide in Gaza is Paul Stretch, a social worker in Portland, Oregon.
Stretch
first engaged in tax resistance decades ago, after the assassination of
Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was gunned down outside of a chapel in El Salvador
in 1980, likely due to his opposition to the U.S.-backed military junta which
had taken control of the country the previous year. The assassination shocked
people around the world, including Stretch, who decided to protest the United
States’ support for the junta by refusing to pay the federal taxes due on his
home telephone line.
As
U.S. support for the junta persisted through the administrations of Jimmy
Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Stretch and his wife refused greater
portions of their federal taxes, redirecting the amounts due to local
nonprofits caring for their neighbors. After their tax debt ballooned to
thousands of dollars, the IRS began garnishing his wife’s wages, forcing them
to give up their tax resistance — until last year.
“I
felt morally compelled to begin engaging in war tax resistance once again when
Israel invaded Gaza and systematically began killing the Palestinian populace,”
he tells Truthout.
Stretch
isn’t alone. As the United States continues to finance the ongoing Israeli
genocide in Gaza — which has claimed the lives of at least 33,175 Palestinians,
including more than 13,000 children and 8,400 women, according to Al Jazeera at
the time of this writing — antiwar organizations are reporting increasing
interest in war tax resistance from former resisters like Stretch and
first-timers as well.
“I
Have Never Been to Court”
Each
year, the United States provides Israel with $3.8 billion in military funding,
according to “Not My Tax Dollars,” a project by the US Campaign for Palestinian
Rights which advocates redirecting those funds to domestic needs, like health
care, housing and education. Although the initiative makes clear what $3.8
billion might otherwise pay for — health care for more than 1 million children,
housing for more than 450,000 families, salaries for more than 41,000 teachers
— it’s much more difficult to pin down where all of that money actually comes
from.
“There
is no single tax that is used to pay for war, but the military takes about half
of anyone’s tax dollar,” says Benn. “So for many of us, the focus is on federal
income taxes and refusing to pay some or all of whatever is owed on April 15.”
“War
tax resistance means refusing to pay some or all of the federal taxes that pay
for war,” Lincoln Rice, coordinator for NWTRCC, tells Truthout. “While you can
refuse income tax legally by lowering your taxable income, for many people, war
tax resistance involves civil disobedience.”
War
tax resistance typically takes one of two forms, as Rice explains. The first,
technically legal method of resisting war taxes is for the taxpayer to
intentionally lower their income below the taxable threshold, which varies by
age and filing status (single, married, head of household). For example, a
single adult under the age of 65 does not have to file a tax return — and
therefore pay federal income tax — if they earn less than $12,950 a year,
according to the IRS. The amount of tax due may also be lowered by various
deductions, such as number of dependents.
The
other form of war tax resistance is the deliberate withholding of all or a
portion of taxes due, often accompanied with a letter of both admission and
explanation to the IRS. In such cases, it is also common for war tax resisters
to donate the amount of withheld taxes to a cause more in line with their
beliefs. The historically pacifist Mennonite Church USA, for example, maintains
a Church Peace Tax Fund to that end.
As
a form of civil disobedience, deliberately withholding taxes may come with
legal consequences, which typically involve fines, rather than imprisonment.
According to Benn, the IRS will send a series of increasingly threatening
collection letters, announcing its “intent to levy,” or garnish income or
assets, around the third letter in the series. The agency will also add both
penalties and interest to the overdue tax debt for up to 10 years, which is
when the statute of limitations expire. In anticipation of potentially paying
the debt, penalties and interest, some war tax resisters set aside, rather than
donate, the withheld taxes. NWTRCC also maintains a War Tax Resistance Penalty
Fund that resisters can also appeal to for financial assistance.
“The
consequences range from fines to garnished wages and collections,” Nick
Lancellotti and June Johnson, co-founders of We the People, an antiwar
organization that advocates war tax resistance, tell Truthout. “To date, only a
handful of war tax resisters have faced jail time, and that was usually as a
result of fraud rather than resistance itself.”
That
distinction — jail time being reserved for fraud, or lying on tax returns,
rather than openly refusing to pay taxes — is borne out by the experience of
Cathy Deppe, a volunteer with NWTRCC and retired teacher in Los Angeles. Deppe
began refusing to pay her federal phone tax in opposition to the Vietnam War
and continued to resist other taxes until 2015, when she stopped filing her
annual return altogether. Although the IRS garnished 50 percent of her Social
Security benefits for eight years, she faced no other consequences.
“There
was a verbal threat by the IRS agent who subpoenaed me to show up with all my
financial records,” Deppe tells Truthout. “When I showed up without them and
took the Fifth [invoked her freedom against self-incrimination], he said he
would see me in court. I have never been to court. … I believe they have
decided I am too much trouble and they are too understaffed.”
“Gaza
Opened My Eyes”
While
some long-time war tax resisters like Deppe never stopped and others like
Stretch are returning to the fold, yet others are discovering tax resistance
for the first time. Both antiwar organizations and new resisters themselves
attribute the wave of interest in tax resistance to the ongoing Israeli
genocide in Gaza.
“NWTRCC
has been the most active on the issue in the last six months, with paid
consultants dedicated to this organizing,” says Benn. “They have been doing
online workshops and managing a rush of new interest on social media, which
used to get a few ‘likes,’ but now gets hundreds or thousands of shares. The
online organizing has been huge for this network.”
Newer
antiwar organizations like We the People have also endorsed war tax resistance
as a means of opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza. In January, We the People
announced “Tax Blackout,” a campaign in coordination with NWTRCC to encourage
U.S. taxpayers to redirect at least 5 percent of their federal income taxes to
local community organizations and charities in Gaza, such as Doctors Without
Borders. In preparation for resistance beyond April 15, We the People is also
encouraging taxpayers to maximize the deductions on their payroll taxes by, for
example, updating Form W-4. (Per the IRS, Form W-4 is filed with employers to
help calculate taxes withheld by employers from workers’ paychecks; workers can
reduce these withholdings by updating their filing status, number of dependents
and/or other adjustments on their W-4s.)
Efforts
by We the People, NWTRCC, War Resisters League, and other antiwar groups are
not only inspiring interest in war tax resistance, but real commitments too.
Among the ranks of former war tax resisters like Stretch who are renewing their
resistance in response to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, there are also
first-timers like Jennifer Shin, a medical writer in Minnesota. Although Shin
is not a member of any pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist organization, she is
planning on participating in war tax resistance for the first time this year
due to the ongoing genocide.
“I
haven’t decided yet if I want to resist this year by either refusing to pay a
small token amount or a larger portion of what I owe,” Shin tells Truthout.
“Regardless of the amount, I also plan on sending a letter of protest with my
tax form. As for the consequences, I anticipate receiving letters from the IRS
or maybe penalty fees, but I am fine with that.”
“The
genocide in Gaza opened my eyes to how financially capable the U.S. becomes
when funding a genocide, but not when it comes to caring for its own citizens,”
Shin continues. “Tax resistance became important to me because I see this as an
actionable form of protest against the funding of the genocide and wars in
general.”
Lawrence
Davidson
The
anti-Arab racism that pervades modern Israel can be traced back to attitudes of
old European imperialism, argued Lawrence Davidson in 2012, in this prescient
forecast of today’s Israeli genocide.
Theodor Herzl at First Zionist Congress in Basel on Aug. 8, 1897. (National Photo Collection of Israel/Wikimedia Commons)
By
the middle of the 19th Century, the multi-ethnic empire was on its way out as
the dominant political paradigm in Europe. Replacing it was the nation-state, a
political form which allowed the concentration of ethnic groups within their
own political borders.
This,
in turn, formed cultural and “racial” incubators for an “us (superior) vs. them
(inferior)” nationalism that would underpin most of the West’s future wars.
Many of these nation states were also imperial powers expanding across the
globe and, of course, their state-based chauvinistic outlook went with them.
Zionism
was born in this milieu of nationalism and imperialism, both of which left an
indelible mark on the character and ambitions of the Israeli state. The
conviction of Theodor Herzl, modern Zionism’s founding father, was that the
centuries of anti-Semitism were proof positive that Europe’s Jews could not be
assimilated into mainstream Western society. They could only be safe if they
possessed a nation state of their own.
This
conviction also reflected the European imperial sentiments of the day. The
founders of modern Zionism were both Jews and Europeans, and (as such) had
acquired the West’s cultural sense of superiority in relation to non-Europeans.
This
sense of superiority would play an important role when a deal (the Balfour
Declaration) was struck in 1917 between the World Zionist Organization and the
British Government. The deal stipulated that, in exchange for Zionist support
for the British war effort (World War I was in progress), the British would
(assuming victory) help create a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. It was no
oversight that neither side in this bargain gave much thought to the
Palestinian native population.
Years
later, beginning in 1945 (at the end of World War II), the British were forced
to officially give up the imperial point of view. They came out of the war with
a population burdened by extraordinary high war taxes.
Retaining
the empire would keep those taxes high and so the British voter elected
politicians who would transform the empire into a commonwealth, granting
independence to just about all the Britain’s overseas territories. One of those
territories was Palestine.
It
is interesting to note that in other European colonies, where large numbers of
Europeans resided, the era following World War II saw their eventual evacuation
as power shifted over to the natives. Kenya and Algeria are examples which show
that this process was hard and bloody, but it happened.
And
when it did happen, the official imperial mind set was defeated. That does not
mean that all Europeans (or Westerners) saw the light and ceased to be racists,
but that their governments eventually saw the necessity to stop acting that
way.
Some
Consequences
Unfortunately,
in the case of Palestine, this process of de-colonization never occurred. In this case the European colonists did not
want the imperial mother country to stay and protect them. They wanted them out
so they could set up shop on their own. They got their chance after the British
evacuated in 1947.
Soon
thereafter, the Zionists began executing a prepared plan to conquer the “Holy
Land” and chase away or subjugate the native population. And what of that
imperial point of view which saw the European as superior and the native as
inferior? This became institutionalized in the practices of the new Israeli
state.
That
made Israel one of the very few (the other being apartheid South Africa)
self-identified “Western” nation states to continue to implement old-style
imperial policies: they discriminated
against the Palestinian population in every way imaginable, pushed them into
enclosed areas of concentration and sought to control their lives in great
detail.
If
one wants to know what this meant for the evolving character of Israel’s
citizenry who now would live out the colonial drama as an imperial power in
their own right, one might take a look at a book by Sven Lindqvist entitled
Exterminate All The Brutes (New Press 1996). This work convincingly shows that
lording it over often resisting native peoples, debasing and humiliating them,
regularly killing or otherwise punishing them when they protest, leads the
colonials to develop genocidal yearnings.
There
is evidence that the Zionists who created and now sustain Israel suffer from
this process. For a long time Israeli government officials tried genocide via a
thought experiment. They went about asserting that the Palestinians did not
exist.
The
most famous case of this was Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who on June 15,
1969, claimed that “there were no such thing as Palestinians. They do not
exist.” One of the reasons she gave for
this opinion was that the Arabs of Palestine never had their own nation state.
Others
took a different approach by denying not so much the existence of Palestinians,
but rather their humanity. At various times and in various contexts, usually in
response to acts of resistance against
occupation, Israeli leaders have referred to the Palestinians as “beasts
walking on two legs” (Menachem Begin); “grasshoppers” (Yitzhaq Shamir);
“crocodiles” (Ehud Barak); and “cockroaches” (Rafael Eitan).
Of
course, these sentiments were not confined to the Israeli leadership. They soon
pervaded most of the Zionist population because the old imperial
superiority-inferiority propaganda had become a core element of their basic
education.
The
Israelis have taught their children the imperial point of view, augmented it
with biased media reporting, labeled the inevitable resistance offered by the
Palestinians as anti-Semitism and took it as proof of the need to suppress and
control this population of “Others.”
And,
from the Zionist standpoint, this entire process has worked remarkably
well. Today all but a handful of Israeli
Jews dislike and fear the people they conquered and displaced. They wish they
would go away. And, when their resistance gets just a bit too much to bear,
they are now quite willing to see them put out of the way.
Thus,
during the latest [2012] round of resistance rocket fire from Gaza and the
vengeful killing that came from the Israeli side, we heard the following: “We
must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages destroying all the infrastructure
including roads and water” (Eli Yishai, present Deputy Prime Minister);
“There
should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. We
need to flatten entire neighborhoods … flatten all of Gaza” (journalist Gilad
Sharon in the Jerusalem Post);
“There
are no innocents in Gaza. Mow them down … kill the Gazans without thought or
mercy.” (Michael Ben-Ari, member of the
Knesset);
Gaza
should be “bombed so hard the population has to flee into Egypt” (Israel Katz,
present Minister of Transportation);
Gaza
should be “wiped clean with bombs” (Avi Dichter, present Minister of Home Front
Defense);
Israeli
soldiers must “learn from the Syrians how to slaughter the enemy” (prominent
Israeli Rabbi Yaakov Yosef).
Finally,
there were the numerous, spontaneous demonstrations of ordinary Israeli
citizens, both in the north and south of the country, where could be heard
chants and shouts such as “They don’t deserve to live. They need to die. May
your children die. Kick out all the Arabs.”
If
it wasn’t for the fact that the outside world was watching, there can be little
doubt that the famed Israeli armed forces would have been tempted to do all
that these ministers, clerics and citizens wished. [Today the outside world is
having little effect on Western governments’ support for the ongoing genocide.]
After
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to a cease-fire [in 2012], a group of
Israeli soldiers showed their frustration by using their bodies to spell out
(in Hebrew) the words “Bibi Loser” (Bibi is a nickname for Netanyahu).
It
was a pre-arranged photo-op and the picture can now easily be found on the Web.
What seems to really irk the Israeli citizenry is not that Bibi killed and
maimed too many innocent Palestinian civilians, but rather that he did not kill
and maim enough of them to grant Israelis “safety and security.”
Throughout
history it has been standard operating procedure to demonize those you fight
and demote to inferior status those you conquer. But as Lindqvist’s work shows,
there was something different about the way Europeans went about this business.
The deeply racist outlook that underlay modern imperialism made it particularly
perverse.
Now
that apartheid South Africa is no more, the Israelis are the last surviving
heirs to that dreadful heritage. So much for a “light unto the nations.” That
proposition has quite failed. Wherever the Israelis and their Zionist cohorts
are leading us, it is not into the light, it is to someplace very, very dark.
Patrick Martin
April 8, 2024
There are two
presidential elections taking place in the United States in 2024. The voting by
the American population, which culminates on Election Day on November 5, will
receive the bulk of the media attention.
Far more
decisive, however, is the second election, which is going on right now, in
which a relative handful of billionaires and corporate oligarchs decides which
of the candidates of the two established capitalist parties, Democratic
President Joe Biden and Republican ex-President Donald Trump, will better serve
their class interests.
As of March 31,
the Biden campaign had more than double the cash on hand of Trump and the
Republicans, $192 million compared to $93.1 million. The Biden campaign is
touting the fact that its war chest is the highest total amount amassed by a
Democratic candidate in US history. It includes $26 million raked in two weeks
ago in Manhattan, where three Democratic presidents—Biden, Obama and
Clinton—and an array of Hollywood and Broadway performers appeared before an
audience with ticket prices that topped out at $500,000.
Trump’s efforts
were given a boost at a record fundraiser Saturday night, held at the estate of
hedge fund billionaire John Paulson in Palm Beach, a short distance from
Trump’s own Mar-a-Lago compound. The price of admission ranged up to $800,000,
and the 117 guests ponied up a total of $50.5 million in campaign pledges,
nearly double Biden’s total at last month’s Radio City Music Hall event.
“Tonight, we
raised an historic $50.5 million for the re-election of President Trump,”
Paulson wrote in a statement to the media Saturday evening. “This sold-out
event has raised the most in a single political fundraiser in history. This
overwhelming support demonstrates the enthusiasm for President Trump and his
policies.”
The enthusiasm
of the assembled billionaires was no doubt fueled by Trump’s 2017 tax cut for
the wealthy and by the fact that the exemption for “pass-through” corporations,
worth $700 billion to private equity firms and other speculative ventures, will
expire in 2025, the first year of the new presidency. Trump’s open embrace of
fascist violence is seen by an increasing section of the ruling elite as
necessary to crush social opposition to its policies of austerity and war.
If money is any
indication, however, there is even more “enthusiasm” among the billionaires for
Democrat Joe Biden, whose war against Russia is seen as critical to the global
interests of the American ruling elite. Dominant sections of the capitalist class
see Trump as too erratic on foreign policy and recognize that Biden’s
occasional anti-corporate demagogy is purely for show, a means of deluding the
population and defusing popular resistance to the war policies of American
imperialism.
Unfortunately
for his electoral prospects, however, Biden’s attempts to present himself as a
“man of the people” have become increasingly strained. “Middle-class Joe” has
been displaced by “Genocide Joe” in public consciousness, as he has become
indelibly associated with the war crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza,
armed and financed by the Biden administration.
Biden continues
to collect multimillion-dollar amounts at closed-door meetings with wealthy
supporters on virtually every campaign swing. On Monday, for example, he
traveled to Wisconsin to unveil his latest political swindle, a proposed
reduction in college student loan repayments, which will provide little actual
benefit. Air Force One then touched down at O’Hare Airport in Chicago so Biden
could attend a fundraiser that collected $2.5 million from about two dozen
individuals (roughly $100,000 apiece).
The co-hosts of
this affair were Michael Pratt, who runs GCM Grosvenor, a $77 billion hedge
fund specializing in “alternative,” i.e., socially “progressive” investments,
and Laura Ricketts, co-owner of the Chicago Cubs and daughter of the
billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade.
Over the
weekend, Politico published a revealing account of the 2024 campaign headlined,
“Big-dollar fundraisers are back,” which noted that both parties are relying on
small affairs where Trump and Biden schmooze with the super-rich to raise the
bulk of their campaign funds. This is particularly important for the Democrats,
the website reported, citing the comments of former Obama fundraiser Ami
Copeland:
For
Biden, burying Trump in cash is central to his general election strategy. He’s
started with a sizable financial advantage over the former president, and
hosting splashy, high-dollar fundraisers helps to further pad that edge. “His
cash advantage is existential,” Copeland said, because “it’s the thing working
the best on the campaign right now.”
The fundraising
for both campaigns seems inversely related to their actual support, given that
polls and media accounts generally concede that Biden and Trump are the two
most unpopular political figures in America. Small-donor fundraising, which was
up substantially in 2016 and 2020, driven initially by support for the
self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders and later by opposition to (or support
for) Trump’s fascist demagogy, has slowed significantly this year.
The massive
domination of money is only one aspect of an electoral process that is
completely undemocratic and aimed at excluding any opposition to the capitalist
two-party system. The Democratic Party, in particular, has taken the lead in
waging an “all-out war” on third party and independent candidates, which will
focus on challenging their efforts to meet massive signature requirements to
gain a place on the ballot.
This is the
state of American democracy in 2024: One of the two major parties is controlled
by the perpetrator of an attempted fascist coup to overturn the 2020 election,
while the other party will renominate the president responsible for an ongoing
war against nuclear-armed Russia and the first genocide of the 21st century.
The Socialist
Equality Party entered the 2024 elections to provide a genuine choice for the
working class, Joe Kishore for president and Jerry White for vice president,
running on a socialist and antiwar program.
In a statement
posted on X/Twitter Monday responding to the massive domination of money over
the election, Kishore wrote:
As
Marxists have long explained, the state is not a neutral arbiter but an
instrument of class rule. It is controlled by a ruling class that supports the
genocide in #Gaza and an escalating global war, while waging a war on the
social and democratic rights of the working class at home.
The
Socialist Equality Party campaign is aimed at developing a movement in the
working class. The existential questions confronting workers in the US and
throughout the world will not be resolved by tinkering around the edges, by
hoping for “change” within the existing political structure. The working class
has to take up the fight against the entire social and economic system of
capitalism. This is the essential question, and the only way to oppose the
drive of the ruling class to world war, dictatorship and capitalist barbarism.
The central
issue in the 2024 elections is to bring the class questions of jobs, living
standards, social benefits, democratic rights and war before the widest
possible audience and to win the most politically advanced sections of workers
and youth to the program of revolutionary Marxism.
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