Clinton, Trump, a British view

This video from the USA says about itself:

Trump Mob Beats Protester, Lies About Gun

7 November 2016

A protester with a sign was beaten by Trump supporters and is being called an assassin by the Trump campaign. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down.

“Almost immediately after news broke that Donald Trump was rushed offstage by Secret Service at a rally in Reno, Nevada on Saturday, Trump’s campaign began playing up what they described as an “assassination attempt.” This is what actually happened: an unidentified person shouted that a man holding an anti-Trump sign had a gun.

Donald Trump Jr. and Dan Scavino Jr., Trump’s social media director, both retweeted a claim by a man named Jack Posobiec, who has a habit of spreading fake news about Trump and his rival Hillary Clinton, that Trump returned to the stage after an “assassination attempt.” Posobiec’s fake news often gets picked up by larger platforms and makes it into the news cycle. He’s a self-described “recovering political operative” and CBS News employee (I was unable to verify this) who is listed as the “Security and Special Projects Director” for a group called Citizens for Trump.

There was no gun, no assassination attempt. The man accused of having a gun, Reno local Austyn Crites, told the Guardian that he is in fact a registered Republican who opposes Trump’s candidacy, describing Trump as “a textbook version of a dictator and a fascist.” He showed up at the rally with a sign reading, “Republicans against Trump,” which received boos from the audience as he moved through the crowd. Then, according to ThinkProgress, Trump spotted the sign from the stage and said, “Oh, we have one of those guys from the Hillary Clinton campaign. How much are you being paid, $1,500? All right, take him out.””

Read more here.

‘Taking someone out´, in mafia parlance, is killing someone.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

A plague on both houses

Tuesday 8th November 2016

THE world faces catastrophe if Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton wins the US presidential election today.

In Trump, candidate of the Republican Party (a political wing of US corporate interest), we have a racist, misogynist boor.

His behaviour and language towards women make him unfit for office.

So too does his incendiary anti-immigrant incitement, demonising Muslims and Mexicans, vowing to make the countries the US exploits pay for the privilege — so Mexico will apparently be made to pay for his absurd border wall, and Cuba for the upkeep of the Guantanamo naval base and concentration camp Washington maintains on its territory.

His mockery of disabled US citizens completes the picture of a vile billionaire who brags about avoiding tax and has nothing but contempt for the billions around the world who, unlike him, were not born into unimaginable wealth and privilege.

In Clinton, the candidate of the Democratic Party (a political wing of US corporate interest), we have an aggressive warmonger who has backed every one of the US’s unprovoked assaults on sovereign nations over the past two decades, in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

In the latter she bragged: “We came, we saw, he died” after the death of former leader Muammar Gadaffi, sodomised with a bayonet before being beaten to death by Nato-backed Islamist rebels.

The descent of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya into permanent civil war has not sated Clinton’s appetite for conflict.

In Syria, her determination to prevent the Bashar al-Assad government defeating al-Qaida in Aleppo is such that she talks of shooting down Russian aircraft — which could spark a world war.

Her confrontational posturing in the Pacific raises the risk of an armed clash with China as well.

A no-fly zone in Syria isn’t a humanitarian response – it’s a call to war: here.

This video from the USA says about itself:

7 November 2016

The Clinton Foundation received a very large donation from a middle-east country [Qatar]. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down.

The Morning Star article continues:

We are living through an exceptionally dangerous political moment: the despatch of British warplanes to join US-led war games in the Yellow Sea between China and Korea comes as Nato is massing troops along the Russian border and our Defence Secretary Michael Fallon muses that we might be ready for war with Moscow in a couple of years.

Many on the left who are — with good reason — terrified of a Trump victory see Clinton as a safer pair of hands, more likely to maintain the liberal status quo.

But the liberal status quo is a world riven with “small” wars (in which hundreds of thousands continue to die) and teetering on the brink of bigger ones.

A world where giant businesses are spinning an ever-expanding web of “trade deals” — TPP, TTIP, Tisa, Ceta — which spell the death of democracy, where the public has no right to choose governments that stand in the way of corporate profit, whatever the social, environmental or human cost.

Declining wages, chronic job insecurity and a broken economic system have created desperation, which feeds far-right demagogues such as Trump in the US and Marine Le Pen in France.

But we cannot defeat the far right by pretending that the causes of that desperation do not exist, which is effectively what those who take up arms for the status quo — whether that takes the shape of Clinton across the pond or the European Union over here — are doing.

The task of socialists is to fight for a real solution to heal the wounds of our broken world: to fight for a planet in which people, not profits, are sovereign; to campaign tirelessly for peace.

That means rejecting Clinton as well as Trump, Jean-Claude Juncker as well as Theresa May.

The choices the ruling class offers us are false ones. Working people the world over deserve better.

Noam Chomsky: People Who Didn’t Vote For Clinton To Block Trump Made A ‘Bad Mistake’. “I didn’t like Clinton at all, but her positions are much better than Trump’s on every issue I can think of”: here.