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.
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