The billionaire CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has said it “really doesn’t matter” who wins the US presidential election, because both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be good for Wall Street.

“I’m tired of hearing this is the biggest election in your lifetime. The reality is over time it doesn’t matter”, said BlackRock chief Larry Fink at an October 21 conference hosted by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, according to the Financial Times.

“It really doesn’t matter”, Fink reiterated. He revealed that, at BlackRock, “we work with both administrations and are having conversations with both candidates”.

BlackRock has $11.5 trillion assets under management, making it the biggest investment company on Earth.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22207480

Carter Sherman, Noa Yachot and Andrew Witherspoon
Wed 6 Nov 2024 06.04 EST

All the takes are correct and yet they also miss the point.

Yes, it was insane for the Democrats to think they could win by running a soulless candidate, without a shred of progressive policy vision, pursuing endorsements from neocon war-hawks everybody hates, while arming and funding a genocide, and belittling and crushing those who have enough morality to protest it. It is enraging that the Democrats are so smug and blind to this.

But these are all just symptoms. The deeper reality is that liberalism has failed, liberalism is dead, and people urgently need to wake up to this fact and respond accordingly. It is a defunct ideology that cannot offer any meaningful solutions to our social and ecological crises and it must be abandoned.

Democrats have proven over and over again that they cannot accept even basic steps like public healthcare, affordable housing, and a public job guarantee - things that would dramatically improve the material, social and political conditions of the working classes. And they cannot accept a public finance strategy that would steer production away from fossil fuels and toward green transition to give us a shot at a liveable future.

Why? Because these things run against the objectives of capital accumulation. And for liberals capital is sacrosanct. They will do whatever it takes to ensure elite accumulation, it is their only consistent commitment. At home, they suppress and demonize progressive and socialist tendencies. Abroad, they engage in endless wars and violence to suppress input prices in the global South and prevent any possibility of sovereign economic development.

The Democrats have done all this purposefully and knowingly, for my whole life, not as some kind of "mistake" but in full consciousness that it is in the interests of capital.

And because liberalism cannot address our crises, and because it crushes socialist alternatives, it inevitably paves the way for right-wing populism. They know this pattern, and yet they risk it every time - this election being only the most recent example. They did it in 2016, when they actively crushed the Sanders campaign and sent Trump to the White House. They do it because ultimately they (and I mean the liberal ruling class here) don't really mind if fascists take power, so long as the latter too ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. They 100% prefer this to the possibility of a socialist alternative.

So, progressives have to face reality. The dream of "converting" the Democratic party is dead. This is now a fact and it must be accepted. The only option is to build a mass-based movement that can reclaim the working classes and mobilize a political vehicle that can integrate disparate progressive struggles into a unified and formidable political force and achieve substantive transformation. This will take real work, actual organizing, but it must be done and that process must begin now.

https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/1854107107743682797

Niraj Warikoo
Detroit Free Press
November 6, 2024 updated 10:03 EST

In an internal email sent on November 3, Patrick Soon-Shiong, medical technology billionaire and owner of the Times, outlined some of the reasons behind his decision that the paper would not endorse a candidate for president this year.

In the email, sent to the LA Times’s top editor and the president and COO and obtained by Drop Site News, Soon-Shiong says the policies supported by both candidates—in what is a clear reference to Israel’s brutal war on Gaza—played an important role in his decision.

“Has there ever been a time in our history,” he writes, “when our nation is knowingly providing arms to another nation using those weapons to kill children, women, innocent people and target the press, doctors and medical workers? And policies enabling this are supported it seems by both candidates?”

“We can and must acknowledge concerns for democracy and the Jan 6 episode and the horific [sic] Oct Hamas attacks,” he continued. “But how do we ignore the counter issues of the innocents being killed now? Do we accept that indeed genocide is happening and that we stand as a country of willing arms suppliers and yet remain silent?”

Donald Trump has been elected the 47th president of the United States, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who refused to accept defeat four years ago, sparked a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Missouri voters approved a measure on Tuesday that enshrines abortion rights in the state constitution and replaces a near-total ban on the procedure.

The measure guarantees a person’s right to get an abortion and make other reproductive health decisions. It opens the door to legal challenges of a ban on most abortions that took effect immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

The measure made the ballot after an intense legal fight led by anti-abortion advocates who sought to prevent a vote.

Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib defeated her Republican opponent in Michigan's 12th congressional district election on Tuesday, securing a fourth term as the only Palestinian-American woman in the US Congress.

The Associated Press called the race with just 18 percent of the votes counted.

Tlaib secured 77 percent of the vote, defeating the Republican Party's James Hooper who received just 19 percent of the vote.

Her victory comes amid the backdrop of Israel's war on Gaza, which has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians so far and has been diplomatically and militarily supported by the Biden-Harris administration for more than a year.

Tlaib has been a vocal critic of the war, calling for the US to withhold weapons from Israel. Her opposition to the war on Gaza and support for pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses have drawn harsh criticism from both Republicans and Democrats.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3840516

Which of you nerds with lemmy.ml accounts are brave enough to crosspost this in the wider lemmyverse?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22191088

Updated November 6, 2024 12:14 AM ET
From St. Louis Public Radio
By Jason Rosenbaum, St. Louis Public Radio

It also includes a ratification bonus, as well as improved retirement and health care benefits, and overtime rules.

After seven weeks on strike, Boeing workers voted Monday to ratify a new contract that includes a 43.65% wage increase over four years — a significant improvement over the 25% increase that the aerospace giant offered in September.

Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Districts 751 and W24 approved the contract in a 59%-41% vote around two weeks after rejecting a tentative deal that called for a 35% pay increase over a four-year period.

The contract approved by workers also includes a $12,000 ratification bonus, improvements to retirement and healthcare benefits, and improved overtime rules.

“Strikes work,” labor journalist Kim Kelly wrote in response to the contract vote.

Archive link

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22122373

https://www.rockthevote.org/how-to-vote/same-day-voter-registration/

map from: https://www.axios.com/2024/10/31/voter-registration-election-day-2024

Another note that New York is currently even weirder having only allowed same day voter registration on a single day of early voting rather than the entire period unlike North Carolina

The Uncommitted National Movement, which promised to leverage constituents' votes to force the Democratic Party to change its position on Israel, received more than $400,000 from a Democratic-aligned PAC that explicitly prevents beneficiaries from endorsing a candidate other than Kamala Harris, Middle East Eye can reveal.

Several activists and volunteers told MEE that the payments appear to explain why the movement refused to endorse a third-party presidential candidate, choosing instead to redeem the Democratic Party among disgruntled voters once it became clear the Biden-Harris administration would not alter course on Israel’s devastating war on Gaza.

The revelations kicked off a firestorm in October amongst Arab-American activists and others formerly part of the Uncommitted movement. They say they felt betrayed by the movement after it began all but endorsing Kamala Harris despite receiving no commitments from the Democratic Party on their demands regarding Gaza and US military support for Israel.

https://t.me/pflpgaza1/14794

Press release

🔴The Popular Front calls for a boycott of the Democratic and Republican parties and stresses the necessity of not voting for advocates of genocide and supporters of colonialism.

• The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine calls on the free people of America, especially the supporters of the Palestinian people, the Palestinian and Arab communities, and the organizations of blacks and minorities, to boycott the Democratic and Republican parties in the American elections scheduled for tomorrow, which share clear colonial goals aimed at exterminating our people and strengthening the Zionist settlement project.

• These two parties were directly involved in the ongoing war of extermination against our Palestinian and Lebanese peoples, and they never concealed their blatant bias in favor of the occupation, and their continued support for its racist policies that target the existence of our Palestinian people and uproot them from their land.

• The positions of the two American parties reflect an explicit adoption of ethnic cleansing, and legitimize the Zionist crimes and massacres against our people, through financial, political and military support for the Zionist entity; the statements of the symbols of these parties also seek to beautify and justify their imperialist policies that adopt a colonial language, which sees the Palestinian people as an obstacle to their alleged “civilizational project”, and their election campaigns ignore the horrific crimes committed daily against Palestinian civilians, especially women and children, in an attempt to cover up the true face of the occupation and legitimize its crimes.

• The Democratic and Republican parties also continue their attempts to attract the support of Zionist lobbies and influential people, in efforts that aim to strengthen the policies of mass displacement and organized repression against the Palestinians.

• In this context, the Popular Front renews its explicit call to all honorable people in American society not to vote for these two parties that use American tax money, which is sucked from the blood of the American people, to support the Zionist genocidal regime.

• The Popular Front sees boycotting these two Zionist parties in tomorrow’s American elections as a moral stance no less important than any other form of solidarity with the Palestinian people and the rights of oppressed peoples. It is also an effective means of struggle to expose the falsehood of American slogans that speak of freedom and human rights. The United States, through its political tools, is trying to exploit these concepts to justify its crimes and consolidate its hegemony over peoples, without caring about the rights of the Palestinians who are subjected to the most heinous types of crimes.

• Finally, the Front considers that the boycott of the two parties is a clear internal message to the American administration and the international system around it that those who collude in shedding the blood of our people and displacing them should not receive the votes of the free people of the world and our communities, who refuse to be contributors to their election or false witnesses to their criminal policy in power.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Central Media Department 4-November-2024

Original post by @SovietReporter@lemmygrad.ml