"The Respect We So Rightly Deserve"

A Radical Critique of the Big Debate Last Night

I believe in what we can do together that is about ensuring we have the respect that we so rightly deserve.

- Kamala Harris, September 10, 2024

Trump on Illegal Immigrant Pet-Eating, the Execution of Babies, “Marxist” Kamala, and More…

I attached a polygraph to my television right before the “debate” between the fascist maniac Donald “Poisoning Or Blood” Trump and Kamala “Shut Up About Genocide Unless You Want Trump to Win” Harris.

The malignant fascist Trump almost blew up the lie detector with the following abjectly false assertions:

·       “We have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums. And they're coming in and they're taking jobs that are occupied right now by African Americans and Hispanics and also unions…[in]“towns throughout the United States…look at Springfield, Ohio… Aurora Colorado…they are taking over the towns. They're taking over buildings. They're going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they're destroying our country.”

·       Illegal immigrants are eating local residents’ pets in Springfield, Ohio: “In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating -- they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country.” (Trump’s evidence: “the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.”)

·       Crime rates are down worldwide and the US crime rate is skyrocketing (false) and this non-existent fact] is because the world is emptying its jail and prisons into the US (false) with the help of the Democrats.

·       “21 million people are pouring into our country monthly.”

·       Democrats are bringing in “illegals” to register them to vote to steal the 2020 election.

·       Trump didn’t recently acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election (he claimed falsely that this acknowledgement was made with “sarcasm”).

·       Biden needs to sign a draconian nativist border bill “right now” – as if the Joe-Kamala “Don’t Come, Don’t Come” Harris administration didn’t back and wasn’t ready to sign a draconian nativist border bill that Trump ordered his Christian Fascist Speaker of the US House to kill since he didn’t want to give Biden-Harris a nativist policy victory before the election.

·       Trump “took a bullet to the head” during the attempted assassination of Trump last June (his ear was clipped).

·       All the legal cases against Trump are “fake cases.”

·       “I have nothing to do with Project 2025.”

·       “Nobody leaves my rallies…We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics”.

·       “People don't go to her rallies…And the people that do go, she's busing them in and paying them to be there.”

·       The legal system has been weaponized against Trump.

·       The assassination attempt was motivated by the “radical Democrats’” supposed “weaponization of the legal system against Trump.”

·         “She’s [Harris is] a Marxist.  Everybody knows she’s a Marxist.”

·       “The Democrats are radical.”

·       “She [Harris] went out in Minnesota and wanted to let criminals that killed people, that burned down Minneapolis, she went out and raised money to get them out of jail.”

·       “She [Harris] is “a radical left liberal” who “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”

·       The Biden administration is “destroying our country” and “hates our country.”

·       Trump had nothing more to do with January 6 than delivering a speech.

·       The fascist insurrectionist Ashli Babbit was unjustly killed by an out-of-control Capitol Police officer on January 6

·       Nancy Pelosi is responsible for the delayed protection of the US Capitol on January 6.

·       “I created one of the greatest economies in the history of our country.”

·       “We [the Trump administration] did a phenomenal job with the pandemic”

·       Trump’s proposed increased tariffs wouldn’t raise prices for US consumers.

·       Current US inflation is “probably the worst ever.”

·       "I went to the Wharton School of Finance, and many of those professors — the top professors — think my [economic] plan is a brilliant plan. It's a great plan." (Katy Milkman, a Wharton professor, tweeted on X:  "Hi! @wharton Prof here. Show me the many colleagues who say Trump’s plan is any good? I count 0!"

·       Polls show that 90 percent of Americans say Trump’s economy was “great” and Biden’s economy is terrible.

·       Solar energy “need[s] a whole desert to get some energy to come out.”

·       Tim Walz supports abortion in the ninth month and “also says execution after birth, it's execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born…”

·       Democrats back abortion “after birth” (that would be infanticide/murder). They want “to execute the baby.”

·       “Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted” Roe v Wade overturned and abortion policy sent back to the states.

·       “I have been a leader on IVF.”

·       “I’m not signing a [national abortion] ban,” contradicted by his refusal to pledge not to sign a national abortion ban.

·       Joe Biden “hates Harris.”

·       Harris “hates Israel.”

·       Harris wants to ban fracking.

·       Harris wants to abolish private health insurance and give everyone government health insurance.

·       Harris wants to “confiscate Americans’ guns.”

·       Harris calls for the de-funding of police.

Some experts suggest that Trump has been lying so prolifically for so long that he is beyond polygraph detection. His brain swims so deeply in untruth that lies don’t even register in his body signals.

Two True Trump Points

Not everything Trump said was a lie or false, however.  He was correct to suggest that Harris’s promise to sign a bill making the right to an abortion the law of the land is farcical since no such bill will get past the right-tilted US Senate. True.

Trump was also right to note that the Biden-Harris White House is conducting a reckless and dangerous war in Ukraine, that Biden has failed to negotiate with Putin for an end to the war, and that the war in Ukraine moves the world closer to World War Three. Also true.

Will Debate Victory Matter?

Harris obviously trounced Trump by any standard and normal debate criteria. On eloquence, coherence, evidence, rationality, decency and more, the contest wasn’t even close.  It was a total blowout for Harris.  But it’s not at all clear that such criteria matter to enough of the hyper-polarized US electorate to make any difference in the outcome of an election that will be badly tilted to the right as usual by an archaic Electoral College and perhaps this time by right wing voter suppression and intimidation, by vote count manipulation by Republi-fascist operatives inside county and local election offices, and by a now fully MAGA-tized, corrupt and illegitimate Christian Fascist US Supreme Court. Hillary Clinton bested Trump by the standard debate criteria and Gore did the same to George W. Bush in 2000.

Harris: Trumpeting Approval from Goldman Sachs; Promising to Keep the World’s “Most Lethal” Military Machine Set on Kill

At the same time, the longtime mass incarcerator and capitalist-imperialist –- “Marxist” LOL! – Kamala Harris told lies of her own and engaged in her own kind of disingenuous, deceptive, and ugly imperialist and nationally chauvinist rhetoric. She:

·       defended Biden’s attempted nativist border bill, She defended eco-exterminist fracking. She falsely claimed that Putin wants to invade Poland.

·       deleted the United States and its tool NATO’s imperialist role in the horrific war in Ukraine and Russia.  

·       falsely identified the reckless warmongering American Empire with the spread and defense of democracy and freedom around the world.

·       evaded – as did the entire debate, including the moderators and Trump – the Biden-Harris administration’s iron-clad and many-sided support for Israel’s criminal policy of GENOCIDAL ETHNIC CLEANSING in Gaza

Not really an issue last night ^

·       sickeningly proclaimed her unwavering support for Israel’s “right to defend itself,” as if that is a blank check for the slaughter of more than forty thousand Palestinians in Gaza and a growing Ziofascist assault on the Palestinian West Bank. 

·       trotted out the fig leaf of a “two state” solution even though she certainly knows that Israel’s ongoing and violent settlements in the West Bank have negated “two-state” dreams.

·       failed to acknowledge the Biden-Harris administration’s failures to seriously defend abortion rights after the Dobbs decision.

* failed to label Trump and Trumpism as fascist, a word top Weimar Democrats refuse to use for reasons explained in a recent Refuse Fascism interview.

·       didn’t bother to defend her neoliberal-Obamanist abandonment of her earlier pretend embrace of progressive health insurance reform (of Single Payer). 

·       didn’t counter Trump’s absurd “defund the police” charge with an honest account of her own record as a harsh police state and mass imprisonment agent. 

·       didn’t’ respond to Trump’s absurd “Marxism” charge with an honest account of her longstanding embrace of capitalism-imperialism – the system that is canceling all prospects for a decent future at an ever-accelerating pace. 

·       cited an interesting institution’s approval as evidence for the rightness of her economic plan: the arch-parasitic, public asset-stripping and environment- killing  global investment banking, securities, and asset and wealth management firm Goldman Sachs.  Dig that, Progressives for Harris!

Last but not least, Harris included these following chilling words in her final statement: “I believe in what we can do together that is about sustaining America's standing in the world and ensuring we have the respect that we so rightly deserve including respecting our military and ensuring we have the most lethal fighting force in the world.”

That is brazen imperialist national chauvinism on steroids. It’ a promise to keep the worlds biggest murder machine set on kill.

Let’s at least be honest about what “Killer Kamala” really means by “the respect that we so rightly deserve” with “the most lethal fighting force in the world”: the fear that Uncle Sam enforces with the most deadly and destructive killing machine that any imperial power has ever deployed across the planet.   

On what moral grounds does Harris think the United States “deserves” the world’s respect?  Her assertion is monstrous in light of the United States’ cold-blooded, mass-murderous and imperialist, war-mongering and regime-changing, Third World Fascism-backing, ecocidal, genocide-backing and nuclear war-menacing record – a record that I have recently recounted  in this long and massively documented essay: “From Hiroshima to Genocide in Gaza,” CounterPunch, September 6, 2024.    

Speaking of “the respect we so rightly deserve” (!), besides being the top imperalist oppressor state by far, the US is the mass incarceration, per capita carbon footprint, gun violence, and school shooting leader of the world.

All of which raises key questions that are far beyond the narrow parameters of acceptable debate in the dominant US media and politics culture: how much longer do we intend to put up with an underlying exterminist and death-dealing class rule system – capitalism-imperialism – that shits up the revolting choice between a demented and decrepit fascist (Trump) and a shiny new imperialist (Harris) who is promising a deceptive identitarian re-brand for the same old parasitic oppression and exploitation order? And how much longer do we think we can keep kicking the existential can down the road of the savagely time-staggered US election cycle until the system does what it is wired to do and is already well on the path to carrying out: the cancellation of all prospects for a decent human future?  Seriously.  What on Earth do we think we are doing with our lives?  When will we finally raise our sights beyond this crippling insanity and undertake what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr rightly called near the end of his life “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters (like the gender and race of the faces in America’s high places). That “issue” was what King called “the radical reconstruction of society itself,” also known as “the revolutionary re-constitution of society at large,” as two young German philosopher activists o[her activists put it in 1848. 

For King the alternative to such sweeping root and branch transformation was a fascist police state.  For Marx and Engels it was “the common ruin of all.”  They are being borne out.  That’s bad news.  The good news is it doesn’t have to be that way. More on that topic in a future post.