We discuss the U.S. elections with professor and political analyst Danny Shaw, who has recently been repressed in the United States for championing the cause of the Palestinian people against the Zionist regime in Israel.
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00:00To offer more context on this key event, we invite to our studio in Caracas, Venezuela,
00:05Professor and Political Analyst Danny Shaw, former Professor of City University of New York,
00:10who was fired for defending Palestinian cause, who is also going to be joining us through the
00:16upcoming days following and analyzing all the news coming from these US elections.
00:20Welcome, Danny, to our studio.
00:22Thank you, Alejandra. It's beautiful to be here in Caracas with you all at TELESUR.
00:28We are just 12 hours away from the US general elections. What can we say about who is
00:35eligible to vote in the US and also what are the pollings saying or is advancing
00:41on this turnout, this year's turnout?
00:44As always, they're telling us this is the most urgent election ever. From the democratic camp,
00:52there's a certain existential crisis, at least that's what they're trying to project. They're
00:56trying to say that if Trump wins, there may never be another election. They're saying that he
01:03represents the greatest threat to American democracy. That, of course, assumes that we
01:08have anything remotely close to democracy. The Republicans, through Trump, are also using their
01:16own campaign of hysteria, saying that if Kamala Harris wins, that the border will be porous and
01:22the border will open up. As we heard in the last debate a month ago, Trump's trying to say that
01:28hundreds of millions of immigrants will stream across the border. Anyone as far as to say that
01:35these immigrants would be a threat to Americans and their dogs and kittens and their pets.
01:43It's a lot of fear mongering. I think one of the most important critiques of the Harris campaign
01:49is that she's so obsessed with Trump and the fear mongering, we really don't know her proposals.
01:55From both sides, it's pure rhetoric for Kamala Harris to go to Michigan,
02:00the state with the most Arabs across the United States, and to now promise a ceasefire deal
02:09when the Palestinian people have been subjected not just to 13 months of genocide, but 76 years
02:15of genocide. What has Kamala Harris or any Democrat or any liberal done to try to halt
02:21this genocide? I think there's a lot of hypocrisy, which is really the essence of
02:27U.S. democracy. I think the hypocrisy is emanating from both camps.
02:33According to surveys, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump are neck to neck
02:39in all seven swing states. In this context, Donald Trump is trying to revive the ghost of
02:45widespread fraud, which inevitably brings to our memories the images of the January 6, 2021 assault
02:52on the Capitol. What is at stake in these U.S. elections? Why is dangerous for this process,
02:59these allegations of the U.S. elections? I'll start with the fraud and then we can talk about
03:06this whole campaign to, quote unquote, get out the vote and why they need that for their
03:11legitimacy. Trump, in his critiques of what he calls the lamestream media, not a term that we
03:20would use on the left necessarily, but it certainly fits. They say a broken clock is correct twice a
03:27day. Trump creates a situation in a sense where he really cannot lose, because if he wins, then
03:34he's going to say, well, you see, I clearly won. But if Kamala Harris, she'll definitely win in the
03:40popular vote. But in this strange thing called U.S. democracy, the popular vote is not what's
03:46important. It's the electoral college. And the electoral college is really a system that most
03:51of us Americans have never understood. So when we're in other countries trying to explain U.S.
03:57democracy in the electoral college, it's almost impossible to even explain. It's something we
04:03inherited from 1787 and the legacy of the enslavement of millions of Africans in the
04:11United States. And really, it's a shame. It's embarrassing that they continue to try to project
04:17that the United States is the greatest democracy in the world when it's not even by popular vote.
04:22We saw Hillary Clinton won by three million votes back in 2016. Still, she wasn't the president. So
04:31what Trump's going to do if he doesn't win Pennsylvania, if he doesn't win Georgia,
04:36he'll scream fraud. Elon Musk, a study just came out that Elon Musk, the feudal owner of Twitter,
04:45we live in an age where a feudal king, a billionaire worth $200 billion can just purchase
04:52one of the biggest social media apps in the world. We see Elon Musk trying to buy votes for Trump
04:57through the super PACs. And if you sign up and sign these petitions that you're going to vote
05:02for Trump, you can be awarded a million dollars. So the fraud is already there. The entire system
05:06is based on bribery and fraud. Most of our senators are millionaires, the vast majority.
05:13So it's really a plutocracy. It's a duopoly. Most American people don't truly have confidence in
05:21this system, but many will vote out of panic and out of the fear mongering that I mentioned
05:27tomorrow. And millions won't vote. Millions will stay home or stay at work and refuse to
05:33participate. Millions of others can't vote because they have some type of crime in their past or
05:39they've gone through the prison system. So I think it's important to recognize around the world the
05:45disenfranchisement that so many people in this system suffer through. Tomorrow could top in
05:542020, 81 million people roughly voted for Biden, 74 million for Trump. I think tomorrow will
06:02probably break that and we'll see even more participation because if you watch Fox News,
06:08it sounds like the end of the world if the Democrats win and vice versa if you watch CNN.
06:13So I think that's going to create an ambience that compels more people to vote.
06:20As you mentioned, these U.S. elections is overshadowed by the war in Gaza, the genocide
06:26taking place in the country, and also by the increasing attacks on Lebanon, all perpetrated
06:33by Israel. So is the Middle East crisis a point that could decide the voting tensions in states
06:40such as Michigan, as you mentioned, that has the largest majority of our American community?
06:46The genocide in Palestine is definitely one of the biggest issues, especially in Michigan.
06:54And even the fact, Alejandra, that we can say genocide in a TV studio because you're never
06:59going to hear that from CNN, MSNBC, Fox. And it's important to call out those networks and that's
07:07why they censor us on YouTube and across social media. All of those networks, whether they're
07:13coming from the liberals or the conservatives, are fully complicit in this holocaust of human
07:20life when they said, never again, they were lying to us. It's certainly, they weren't thinking of
07:28the Palestinian people. They weren't thinking of the people in Sudan or the Congo or the blockaded
07:34peoples of Nicaragua or Cuba when they said, never again. So this issue of the genocide looms large.
07:41We've seen this whole campaign that came out of Michigan of uncommitted voters saying that they
07:47absolutely refused to vote for the Democrats. Many Palestinian organizations and their leadership
07:53have the slogan, anybody but Kamala, anybody but the genocidal Democrats. And I think a lot of
08:00people, even though they see Trump's views in politics as odious, they can appreciate that
08:07Trump represents a monkey wrench to the entire system. And certainly the truly ruling class
08:15candidate is Kamala Harris. If you look at the FBI and the CIA who are supposedly apolitical,
08:22but now they publish letters in the New York Times, at least they did in 2016, it's clear that
08:27they see Trump as an existential threat. They don't see Trump as presidential. So I think the genocide,
08:34I think Kamala represents the continuity, the uninterrupted continuity of the genocide.
08:41If Trump wins, he's such a loose cannon that we can't talk about continuity. And certainly the
08:48fact that Trump is threatening the US-NATO-Western European war on Russia with how many Ukrainians
08:57trapped in the middle of this proxy war. Trump represents a legitimate threat to the ruling class.
09:03It's not from the left wing as we would like. It's really from the extreme right wing. In fact,
09:08Trump has been subjected to two assassination attempts just in the past few months. And the
09:13latest assassination attempt, roughly six weeks ago, came from an individual obsessed with what
09:19he considered a liberation war in Ukraine and wanted to assassinate the former President Trump
09:26because he saw him as a threat to this ongoing war. They've invested hundreds of billions of
09:32dollars of our taxpayer money, the people and workers of Germany, England, France. This is a
09:39broadly unpopular war. But they continue full speed ahead, even though the surveys across
09:46the United States are in the 70th percentile of Americans who want this war with Russia to end.
09:53Thank you. Thank you, Danny, very much for your time here in From the South.
09:57We are talking to our special guest, Dani Shaw, who is going to be joining us here in From the
10:02South for the coming days to analyze all the details of this year's general elections. We're
10:07going to take a short break now. But first, we invite you to follow our special program dedicated
10:11to the upcoming US elections only on Telesur today at 9pm local time, Caracas time, at 8pm New York,
10:19Havana and Quito time. We'll be right back. Stay with us.