#INDIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

[nando161mando]

An Anti-fascist Guide to the US 2024 Election https://www.anarchistfederation.net/an-anti-fascist-guide-to-the-us-2024-election/

[who-canceled-roger-rabbit]

I wonder if the "refugees eating our pets!" bit is Trump trying to repurpose the Hindu nationalist trope of justifying anti-Muslim violence with accusations of abusing cattle

[fuck-i-like-too-much-stuff]

I hope all my USAmerican moots are doing okay

[harriswalz4usabybr]

Monday, August 26, 2024 - Tim Walz

The Governor is excited to be home taking care of gubernatorial duties in the great state of Minnesota. Tonight he will be having dinner at Kelly’s Taphouse and Grill in Red Wing, MN with members of the Prairie Island Indian Community. This dinner is in an effort to better understand the shortcomings past administrations have made regarding Native Americans. Additionally, we are hoping that a presence in the county will help bolster turn out for the campaign.

[alyfoxxxen]

Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians observe 100 years of U.S. citizenship by walking together to vote on Election Day | News | uniondemocrat.com

[insightfultake]

The U.S. Election: Democracy for the Rich, A Farce for the Rest

As the United States prepares for yet another electoral contest, it’s easy to get caught up in the drama—the speeches, the debates, the controversies. But to truly understand what’s happening, we need to adopt a critical lens that cuts through the noise. Looking at the U.S. elections from a global perspective—specifically from India—reveals a different picture, one that goes beyond the personalities and the pageantry. It’s a picture of power, wealth, and the global order.

At its core, the U.S. election is a spectacle designed to reinforce a system of corporate dominance. The two dominant political parties, the Democrats and Republicans, may appear to be at odds on a few issues, but when it comes to the big questions—the economy, foreign policy, and military intervention—they largely serve the same masters: multinational corporations, defense contractors, and the ultra-wealthy. This is the real game. The winner of the election might get to wear the crown, but they are all part of the same royal court, bound by the same rules....Expand to read more

[jarvis-invest]

Discover the potential implications and impact of the U.S. presidential election on Indian markets, including stock performance, foreign investment, and currency stability. Stay informed with our insights and analysis.

[drownininstuff]

seeing how the 2024 presidential debate played out, would love to see an indian politics verison during the next elections.

[textsearchaccessgooglemicrosoft]

CARTER

[uniqueeval]

Trump’s edge over Kamala Harris on economy, crime plunges, Reuters poll shows | World News

With 70 days left for the US presidential election, the race to the White House is nearing its climax and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris is closing the gap against her opponent former President Donald Trump on the economy and crime issues, according to a Reuters poll. The poll by Reuters/Ipsos was conducted over a period of three days from Aug 23-25 and it showed Donald Trump’s approach…

[nando161mando]

‘We must push past the merry-go-round of leaders that say every four years “This is our time” then “We must wait more”.

We must pour that snake oil out onto the road. No more waiting on the messiah Democrat politician. None seeks to be our “retribution”.

Patience has only led us to the gate of lynch mob rule.’

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/8/24/black-freedom-has-never-been-on-the-ballot

[theburialofstrawberries]

In the spring and summer of 2023, Senate Bill 403, which sought to add caste as a form of ancestry protected from discrimination, was making its progress through California’s legislative process. It was watched closely by the state’s 2 million people of South Asian descent, with Ambedkarite activists backing the effort and Hindutva groups opposing it. On 11 September 2023, SB 403 was sent to the governor’s office after receiving near-unanimous support in both the state assembly and senate. A few days later, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, went to Chicago to attend a meeting with donors to a political-action committee working on President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. There, he met Ramesh Kapur, who runs a Massachusetts-based company manufacturing medical equipment as well as the US–India Security Council, a lobbying organisation. Kapur has been involved in fundraising for candidates of the Democratic Party since 1983, when he helped elect the future presidential nominee Michael Dukakis to a second term as Massachusetts governor. “If you want to be our next president, veto the bill,” Kapur told Newsom, according to Harper’s Magazine. Newsom did so on 7 October, sending Kapur an email hours before he issued the veto.

Every day I learn one new evil fact about gavin newsom

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

In 1972, in the Democratic primary, we had our first Black woman presidential candidate, “unbought and unbossed” Shirley Chisolm, who knew that she was only running a symbolic campaign, a protest campaign, that America was not going to elect a non-white person or a non-male person, let alone someone with the temerity to be both at the same time—of course she didn’t get the nomination. When she ran, Barack Obama was going on eleven. Kamala Harris turned eight later that year. I doubt anyone was telling them they could grow up to be president.

I was so moved by how Kamala Devi Harris was received when she became our presidential candidate in July of 2024, 52 years after Shirley Chisolm, how much more enthusiasm and respect and how much less racism and sexism than I anticipated from Democrats and progressives. It made me feel like I lived in a better country, a country that had somehow invisibly, incrementally, moved forward, in those ways too slow and subtle to measure until a milestone like this is reached. Somehow something as subtle as values, consciousness, norms had changed through the work so many people were doing in so many ways, the feminists and antiracists, the slow process of decentralizing power just a bit from the long grim era when only white men ran and won and governed.

Things are changing. Last week, President Biden went to the Gila Reservation in Arizona to apologize for the Indian boarding schools and other genocidal acts toward Native Americans. He said in a tweet:

Today, I’m in Arizona to issue a long overdue presidential apology for this era—and speak to how my Administration has worked to invest in Indian Country and our relationships with Tribal Nations, advance Tribal sovereignty and self-determination, respect Native cultures, and protect Indigenous sacred sites. We must remember our full history, even when it’s painful. That’s what great nations do. And we are a great nation.

A few decades ago, Native people were largely ignored by the non-native mainstream, and what the US government had done was justified when it was not just ignored. We live in the impossible world, the world that no one quite imagined, in which things happen—marriage equality, the possibilities brought by solar energy, a Black woman presidential candidate—that were inconceivable not long ago.

I think of all the land-back happening around the West, of the four dams coming down on the Klamath River under the stewardship of the several Native nations there, of the salmon already swimming more than a hundred miles up that river to Oregon after more than a century of being shut out, of this presidential apology that acknowledges 532 years of colonialism. Biden’s tweet strategically rebukes Trump and MAGA and all the fragile white nationalists by insisting that this country is already great, and that greatness means remembering and taking responsibility for the wrongs of the past, including this genocidal racism.

That this country is polarized is often deplored, but the backlash against the progress on human rights, equality, inclusion, environmental protection, and acknowledging the US’s often-brutal history, is no reason to give up or cave in on that progress, though it’s a reason to reach out to try to convey that we all benefit from it.

What’s also been moving to me since this election really picked up momentum a few months ago is to see how much people care about something beyond narrow and immediate self-interest, to see that we care about public life, about the fate of the nation, about the rule of law, about the survival of the most vulnerable. To see that we are idealists, we are dreamers, we are citizens in that sense not of nationality but of membership in the greater community. Something striking this time around is to see men speak up for reproductive rights to a degree and in a way they mostly have not before.

We love so much more than the narrow version of who we are acknowledges: we love justice, love truth, love freedom, love equality, love the confidence that comes with secure human rights.

So many powerful forces conspire to try to convince us that we are basically selfish animals, that all we want is the the goods of private life, some safety, some sex and personal love and family, some nifty possessions. That’s the story of human nature we get told the most. But in fact most human beings are altruists and idealists, which is to say we want a lot more, we care about a lot more, we need a lot more to feel right with the world. We want justice and peace, want to live in a society that supports these things, want a relationship with nature, and we want that nature to be protected and thriving.

We want a world that reflects our values, we feel injured by things that may not affect us directly, whether it’s a wildfire or a loss of rights. Of course they’re not all the same values, and yeah some people believe they need to persecute immigrants or trans youth to have their happy world, some people still think nature is so vast and immutable we can keep trashing it without consequences. But mainly what I’m trying to say is that most people care about a lot beyond the usual definition of self-interest. We’re bigger than that.

You can see that by how much people care about the outcome of this election, whether they’re sitting home refreshing polls as if the polls tell us what will happen or doing the work that decides what will happen. Someone said to me a week or so ago that people over 70 shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they had no self-interest in the future. I rebuked him, because across the political spectrum most of us vote our broad values, not our narrow self-interest, unless our values are that we’re just our self-interest (and that’s a core belief of the right).

Most of us are idealists. There’s been a lot of exclamation in recent years about right-wing working-class voters who vote against their self-interest, often portrayed as baffling, as a sign of ignorance or confusion. What’s really going on that they’re more committed to their values than their practical self-interest. So are we (though you could also argue that the recognition that we are inextricably connected to each other and to nature means that self-interest and the well-being of the whole are not separate).

I used the word care, but let me clarify: what we care about is what we love. And we love so much more than the narrow version of who we are acknowledges: we love justice, love truth, love freedom, love equality, love the confidence that comes with secure human rights; we love places, love rivers and valleys and forests, love seasons and the pattern and order they imply, love wildlife from hummingbirds to great blue herons, butterflies to bears. This always was a love story.

Part of what gives our lives meaning is the confidence or at least hope that these good things will persevere beyond us.

What I learned from studying how most human beings respond to disasters (for my book A Paradise Built in Hell) is that they’re brave, generous, creative, acting in solidarity with those around them, and that those experiences of immediacy, of community, of care, of connection and meaningful work, are often so profound that people speak up with joy even amidst the devastation and loss. Because we want meaning and meaningful work so much, we want connection so much, we want hope, we want to believe in ourselves and the people around us and humanity in general.

I’m hearing so many stories like that from the survivors of the climate-intensified hurricanes that trashed western North Carolina, coastal Florida, and other parts of the Southeastern USA. From the victims of a climate-intensified catastrophe that has wrecked whole towns and torn out roads, flattened forests, washed away homes and put parts of Asheville underwater. I don’t want any more disasters like that, and I’m a climate activist to try to keep nature from getting more violent and destructive, which it will if we keep being violent and destructive toward the climate. But I do want us to know who we are, and how hungry we are for meaning, purpose, and connection, and sometimes disaster lets us see that.

When it comes to the climate we want faith in the future, we want the symphony of life to continue with the harmonies, the beauties, the integration of the parts into one harmonious whole to continue. Part of what gives our lives meaning is the confidence or at least hope that these good things will persevere beyond us, that there will be bison grazing the prairies in the year 2124, that there will be whales migrating in the oceans, that wildflowers will bloom in spring and pollinators will come for the nectar and leave with the pollen, that the people we love who are one or six or seventeen or their grandchildren will have a chance to enjoy some of the things we have, that there will be joy and beauty and possibility in the year 2074 and after.

Polls offer the false promise of knowing what is going to happen, but what is going to happen in this election is what campaigners, activists, and the electorate make happen. It is not yet decided. We are deciding it with what we do, as voters, as organizers, as voices for truth, justice, inclusion, the reality of the climate crisis and the importance of acting on it. In June, I got to meet one of my heroes, Congressman Jamie Raskin when he gave a keynote for the Third Act chapters in DC, Virginia and Maryland. (Third Act is a climate group founded by Bill McKibben for US people over 60; I’m on its board.) He gave me his memoir of prosecuting the impeachment of Trump after January 6, right after his beloved son Tommy had died by suicide, and there’s a dazzling passage in it that reminds us of the power of participation.

He writes that, during his first campaign, there was an article in a local newspaper quoting a pundit who described my chances of victory as “impossible”; and nine months later, when we got 67 percent of the vote, there was another article, in the Washington Post, quoting a pundit who said my victory was “inevitable.” So we went from impossible to inevitable in nine months because the pundits are never wrong, but as I told Tommy, we showed that nothing in politics is impossible, and nothing in politics is inevitable. It is all just possible, through the democratic arts of education, organizing, and mobilizing for change.

We’re here to make the victory of democracy and the defeat of authoritarianism not just possible but actual. We’re here to make history. We’re here to get out the vote. For the climate, for the children, for the continuance of this experiment in democracy, imperfect as it has been.

_____________________________

This is a version of a talk given to Third Act Nevada as part of a rally for people getting out the vote in that swing state. 

Rebecca Solnit

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty-five books on feminism, environmental and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. She co-edited the 2023 anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Her other books include Orwell’s Roses; Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and in 2022 launched the climate project Not Too Late (nottoolateclimate.com).

[mariacallous]

After months of spewing racist remarks about Kamala Harris and ginning up his base about invasions at the border and the promise to harm millions of immigrants, Donald Trump will once again be the president of the United States. Despite his naked racism and misogyny and attacks on his political opponents, the American people have chosen to send him back to the White House. Candidates use the last days of their campaign to make their final case before the American people. They say the thing you want voters to remember as they’re casting their votes on Election Day. The last thing Trump wanted millions of Americans to hear from him and his campaign? A cacophony of bigotry. Trump chose to host a rally in New York City that was reminiscent of a Nazi rally held there 85 years ago. He was set to speak in front of thousands of his fans in his hometown — but first, more than two dozen surrogates would get on stage to make the case for him. Comedian and podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe compared Puerto Rico to a pile of garbage, said Black people carve watermelons on Halloween and made crude comments about the sexual habits of Latinos. David Rem, who the campaign said is a childhood friend of Trump, called Democrats “degenerates.” Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Harris was a “Samoan, Malaysian low-IQ” person. (Harris’ father is Jamaican, and her mother is Indian.) The only comment the GOP attempted to do damage control on was the “joke” about Puerto Rico. Having such explicit racism on stage during a rally for a presidential campaign speaks volumes about the Republican Party and America at large. White conservative ideology, and by extension, Trump, has long been threatened by the sense that full racial equality was just on the horizon. It is not an accident that Trump began his political career after America elected its first Black president. During their own presidential campaigns, famous Alabama segregationist George Wallace promoted keeping the races separate and George H.W. Bush deployed an ad implying his opponent Michael Dukakis would let violent Black criminals out of prison. Ronald Reagan touted his love of “states rights” at a speech in Mississippi near the site of where civil rights workers had been brutally murdered 16 years earlier. Critics viewed it as a wink to racist white Southern voters. Still, no other major-party presidential candidate has embraced explicit racism the way Trump has. Trump entered the political foray during the Obama administration by leading the charge in the false claims that the president was secretly born in Kenya and thus ineligible to be president. A few years later, in a now infamous scene, he would come down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce that he was running for president himself and referred to Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. His major policy promise was to build a wall along the southern border. As president, Trump instituted a ban on people from several majority-Muslim countries entering the country, told three members of Congress who are women of color to “go back to where they came from,” and tried to send in the military to squash racial justice protesters. His reelection campaign in 2020 was marked by more of the same. During his speech accepting the GOP’s nomination, Trump said Democrats wanted to release “criminals” into suburban neighborhoods and declared on X that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” referring to Black Lives Matter protesters. Much of that seems tame compared to the 2024 campaign.

[olivafans]

Trump takes Elon Musk's side in H-1B visa debate, says he's always been a fan of the program

President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday sided with his top supporter and billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk in a public spat over the use of the H-1B visa, saying he fully supports the foreign tech worker program, which some of his supporters oppose. Trump’s remarks followed a series of social media posts by Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla (TSLA.O) and SpaceX, who vowed on Friday night to go to “war” to protect the U.S. foreign worker visa program. Trump, who has tried to limit the use of visas during his first term, told the New York Post on Saturday that he also favored the visa program. “I have a lot of H-1B visas in my portfolio, I’m a big fan of H-1B. “I’ve used it many times. It’s a great program,” he said. Elon Musk, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in South Africa, has been granted an H-1B visa, and his electric car company Tesla has been granted 724 such visas this year. H-1B visas are generally valid for three-year periods, although holders can extend them or apply for a green card.

The row was sparked earlier this week by far-right activists who criticized Trump's choice of Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-American venture capitalist, to be an artificial intelligence advisor, saying it would influence the Trump administration's immigration policies.

Elon Musk's tweet was aimed at Trump supporters and immigration extremists, who are increasingly calling for the repeal of the H-1B visa program amid a heated debate over immigration and the place that skilled immigrants and foreign workers bring into the country with work visas. On Friday, Steve Bannon, a confidant of Trump, criticized the "big tech oligarchs" for supporting the H-1B program and called immigration a threat to Western civilization. In response, Musk and many other tech billionaires have drawn a line between what they consider legal immigration and illegal immigration. Trump has promised to deport all immigrants who are in the United States illegally, impose tariffs to help create more jobs for American citizens and severely limit immigration. The visa issue shows how technology leaders like Musk - who played an important role in the presidential transition, advising key personnel and policies - are now attracting the attention of their base. The U.S. tech industry relies on the government’s H-1B visa program to hire skilled foreign workers to help run their companies, a workforce that critics say undercuts the wages of American citizens. Elon Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help Trump get elected in November. He has been writing regularly this week about the lack of domestic talent to fill all the positions needed at American tech companies.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

i find it somewhat perplexing the way a lot of liberals i see not only treat voting and electoral organising altogether as good and important or even treat voting in the upcoming us presidential election as good and important but treat the very concept of an election boycott as demonstrably pointless and counterproductive apriori and in all places and times. i think this sweeping position only even potentially makes sense if you treat elections as more or less like a god deterministically allotting political office and power in accord with a preestablished voting function taking only legitimate ballots cast as argument. if only 10% of eligible voters are willing to cast their votes, ceteris paribus this is going to undermine the appearance of legitimacy of the electoral process—which can obviously often have consequences desirable from the pov of ppl who see the process as in fact illegitimate!!

ig sometimes ppl qualify the maximally strong version of the claim instead saying its only in competitive elections you have a self evident rational duty to vote, and ig in fairness most of the meaningful vote boycotts that come to mind are for races where ppl already know ahead of time who the winner is going to be (see above point re legitimacy); the example that brought this whole line of thought to mind was the recent presidential election in algeria, for example, where the perceived illegitimacy and tebbounnes status as a shoe in were obviously linked. but you can find examples of vote boycotts its hard to denounce where the races involved were in some sense quite competitive. the 1984 elections for the newfangled indian-only house of delegates in south africa, for example, saw the top two parties differing by half a percent in terms of votes and one seat in eventual representation, but were still widely boycotted for... obvious reasons. are we really going to condemn the indian south africans of 1984 for this? does anyone really think the world would be a better place had nonwhite south africans dignified the desperate death throes and pitiful conciliatory half-measures of apartheid with large scale electoral participation?

ig this is all kind of academic and abstracted from certain looming usamerican concrete realities, but so are the terms in which ppl justify the sweeping universal versions of the pro-voting position