EDITOR'S NOTE: This post originally appeared in Forward Kentucky
By BERRY CRAIG
Here’s a memo to progressives who still say they won’t vote for the guy they slam as “Genocide Joe."
Item #1: “President Joe Biden is looking past resistance from key Israeli officials as he presses Israel and Hamas to agree to a three-phase agreement that could immediately bring home dozens of Israeli hostages, free Palestinian prisoners, and perhaps even lead to an endgame in the nearly eight-month-old Gaza war,” the Associated Press reported.
Item #2: “Former president Donald Trump promised to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, telling a roomful of donors — a group that he joked included “98 percent of my Jewish friends” — that he would expel student demonstrators from the United States, according to participants in the roundtable event with him in New York,” the Washington Post reported.
According to the paper, the MAGA moneybags confessed that Trump even promised, “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
Trump pledged that if he is reelected, he will “set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” according to the moneybags who talked with the Post “on the condition of anonymity to detail a private event.”
The Post story is more proof that Trump will green light anything Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chooses to do in his war against Hamas in Gaza.
“Speaking to wealthy donors behind closed doors, Trump said that he supports Israel’s right to continue ‘its war on terror’ and boasted of his White House policies toward Israel,” the Post said.
More than a few of us union-card carrying Biden loyalists think it’s way past time for our guy to be more forceful with Netanyahu who, no doubt, would welcome a second Trump term. Like Trump, Israel’s far right PM leans steeply toward authoritarianism.
In the fundraiser, Trump made it plain that he’s ready to write Netanyahu a blank check.
Sadly, Netanyahu mocks the democratic principles on which Israel was founded in 1948. Likewise, Trump, who flirts with fascism, is an existential threat to American democracy.
Many U.S. progressives, including union members like me, are for a cease fire in Gaza, where untold numbers of civilians, including children, have been killed, wounded, bombed out of their homes, and starving.
In December, the UAW International Executive Board announced the union was joining a growing number of labor organizations in calling for a ceasefire in Israel and Palestine.
“From opposing fascism in WWII to mobilizing against apartheid South Africa and the CONTRA war, the UAW has consistently stood for justice across the globe,,” said Region 9A Director Brandon Mancilla. “That is why I am proud that the UAW International is today officially calling for a ceasefire in Israel and Palestine.”
But in January, UAW President Sean Fain announced his union’s endorsement of Biden.
Fain said the choice “for the united working class” was clear: “Joe Biden bet on the American worker while Donald Trump blamed the American worker.”
Fain, who doesn’t pull punches, said Trump “doesn’t care about the American worker.” He called Trump as “a scab,” adding “Donald Trump is a billionaire and that’s who he represents.”
Fain poured it on:
“If Donald Trump ever worked in an auto plant, he wouldn’t be a UAW member, He’d be a company man trying to squeeze the American worker. Donald Trump stands against everything we stand for as a union, as a society. When you go back to our core issues: wages, retirement, health care and our time, that’s what this election’s about.”
Here’s the bottom line: Not voting for the president is dangerously foolish and playing squarely into Trump’s hand.
Warned Professor Robert Reich, whose progressive creds could hardly be more impeccable:
By not voting or voting for a third party, they’re actually casting a vote for Trump.
Some respond by saying that Trump may be a curse, but they’re sick and tired of voting for the lesser of two evils.
Wrong. Biden is not evil. Trump is trulyevil.
If there’s one argument I can’t stand, it’s the ‘ I’m not going to vote for the lesser of two evils’ argument.
The fact is, America has a two-party system. You may not like it, but that’s our reality. The founders did not opt for a parliamentary system, where citizens have more options of whom to vote for.
So one of the nominees from one of the two major parties is going to win. And if you don’t vote, or you vote for a third-party candidate, you’re inevitably hurting the candidate from one of the major parties who’s closest to you in values — and helping the one farthest from you.