Tag Archives: Joe Biden

2020 US Presidential Election

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If the late great Gladston Holder were alive he would take the opportunity to remind us that it does not matter who is elected to the White House, it the wealthiest families in the USA where the power is located- the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers et al. That said many will agree party colours aside, Trump’s legacy will be remembered as being one of the most bigoted and divisive.

Let it be no secret this blogmaster cannot wait to see the back of the man. He has disgraced the office of president of the USA and by extension the human race.

Discuss for 2 marks.

JOE BIDEN, SO-CALLED ‘PROGRESSIVES’ AND THE REARRANGEMENT OF THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

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Submitted by Pachamama

As the coalition of forces gather with their vested interests of displace the American fascist dictator, Donald Trump, on a civil warlike political battlefield, it is becoming quite clear that people who call themselves ‘progressives’ will only awake to the machinations, political tricks, being conjured and to the tectonic shifts under the battlefield when it is far too late. Such a re-imagining of American politics, as neoliberalism was the remixing of economic policies, must of necessity, leave ‘progressives’ out in the cold.

We are estimating that this Democratic-led coalition which is likely to emerge from a possible victory will lurch much further rightward than progressives are generally imagining. For Joe Biden is merely running as a Democrat but intends to rule as a Republican. This is all he has known all his life. Being a conservative Democrat means being a Republican. Same as Obama, there are few differences between factions within the duopoly. Biden has never been known to instinctively done anything progressive in his whole life. Above all, politics is about slicing and dicing as an acceptable method of gaining power, not being a fountain of virtue. Not interfering with the hideous structural infirmities on which the country has been built. This is representative of Joe Biden to the bone!

Therefore, it would be irrational to expect a man like Biden to approach, for example, the misanthropically inspired symbology represented by the ‘Star Spangle Banner’, the national anthem, which glorifies slavery in one of its verses. Or revisit the 13th Amendment of the constitution which still legalizes slavery for people in America’s dungeons, 80% of whom are of colour. Need we go on?

Then, the question which progressives will never get answered is – how could he ‘Build Back Better’ on such a flawed foundation? All Biden really wants to do is to get back to how things were before Donald J. Trump was thrown up by the political culture as if those represented halcyon days for Afrikan-Americans, supposedly his most dependable bloc. That’s all!

But, who are these people generally referred to as ‘progressives’? Well, they could be any motley bunch of political gradations from the far-right to the far-left and in-between. To the far-right they may include Republicans who support the logic of climate change and even never-Trumpers. To the far-left they may be communists, antifascists, socialists or even Trotskyists influenced by the lesser of two evils logic.

In this scenario, Joe Biden would, in effect, be the ‘unwitting’ savior of the Republican Party which is likely to be devastated by a massive defeat, if current polling holds true and in the event Trump is unable to complete that well-planned dastardly act currently underway. Should Biden be buoyed by the winds of a fierce national and overwhelming determination which forces Trump into having no other choice but to leave the White House, even to the point of duress if deemed necessary he saves the Republican Party. In so doing, he would be serving the hordes of Republicans seeking asylum within the Democratic Party as a way of making sure the indispensable other half of the American political duopoly survives Trumpism – the Republican Party.

When we look back at the presidency of Trump, in this scenario, it might appear as though a level of master planning, by hidden hands, paved the way for Biden. He could have the prefect landing to enable him to jettison feckless progressive operating under the assumption that this Democratic Party’s ‘donkey’ will take them somewhere. In addition, Biden could have a highly conservative Supreme Court; a Senate which could be Democratic led but more than willing to serve his less than obvious conservative agenda and a House of Representatives acting likewise with muted or sporadic objections from its progressive caucus.

In these circumstances, the LGBTQ identity politicos, who played such an enormous role during the Obama administration, would not be able to co-exist with the Republican elements within the Biden Coalition, absent the few Log Cabin Republicans. If Biden is faced with a choice between these political forces, there is little doubt that he will go with his new-found friends for the fear about defections of the Republicans may cause too much imbalance within his coalition. He will seek to equalize that action by resting on the logic that the LGBTQ forces generally have nowhere else to go.

The same thinking holds true for Afrikan-Americans, Hispanics, and other progressives who will have nowhere to go notwithstanding the presence of a fledgling Green Party with a presidential candidate, Howie Hawkins, and up to maybe a 100 other people seeking the presidency. Defections of progressives are likely to be deemed as merely a temporary setback. Afrikan-Americans should not expect this reformulation of political forces within neoliberal capitalism will deliver any of Biden’s promises about ‘Building Back Better’ and so on. Nothing will happen but talk, until after the election when the drift to the right becomes public. Observers however, can see what a Biden administration will look like right now by the examination of his teams of advisers. To us such expectations are the equivalent of asking a dead man to change his will and expecting it to happen.

One good thing about Biden is that he has dared to locate himself as it to remove the scab from the old festering wounds making America the fascist state it might have always been and/or to which it has now degenerated for all to see. Of course, he was well assisted by the ongoing demonstrations throughout the country and being a politician there was a need for a response that made sense in order to garner the votes of Afrikan-Americans, women, progressives, young people etc.

In some ways Biden has been sheltered by Whiteness and a hyper focus in the country on what is wrongly seen as a cultural anomaly, the Trump presidency. However, the deeper truth is that Biden will never fix, or even start to fix, in eight (8) years, what was consolidated over four centuries.

Guided by history, only the total and complete destruction of American empire can satisfactorily settle these deeply divisive issues, correct all the fundamental social problems that have been termed ‘original sins’. Some contend that this fatal option maybe better that Biden’s return to an abnormal normalcy. Progressives should have long recognized the existential forces at work and found ways to insert someone more able to deal the rebuilding that has to happen and therefore avoid this Biden misdirection.

Fascism – The Capture of the Republican Party by TRUMP

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Submitted by Pachamama

By the end of the business day, Thursday 27 August 2020, political history of the world would have been written by one Donald Trump. This grifter would have achieved total and unquestioned controlled over the Republican National Convention (RNC) apparati and inserted his brand in such a way that there would be no recognizable differences between man, family and party. The former Republican Party would have become an integral part of the ‘family businesses.

The current coming-out ‘party’ convention has been so organized so that not a whisper of dissent could be given voice. Every ‘man jack’ chosen to speak was to be a reliable Trumpeter. Only Hitler was this exacting. Dissidents were either skillfully sidelined, assigned to the political wilderness in search of uncertain futures or made to join the growing numbers of ‘never-Trumpers’ in groups like the Lincoln Project, in exile as outside supporters of Joe Biden, a man who himself, is less than compos mentis.

As Trump plays for keeps, the clear intention is the deployment of the party organization for the maximization of personal and generational wealth. He and he alone must be the richest man in the world. This is Trump’s personal party! This is all happening, while the Democratic congressional leadership is running around talking about passing this bill, and that bill. But none of this matters to Trump. For Trump, they provide good cover for him to reshape the political structure, under their feet, and in his own image, his brand. The Republican leadership, on the other hand, has been mere lapdogs to this new ‘King’ of America!

We would be unsurprised should Trump emerge from this convention gaining the added bonus of reducing the margins between himself and Biden, a post-convention bounce. This is the normal bounce expected, which Biden failed to obtain from his own theatrical displays of last week.

At the end of the day we would fail to see, if Trump is as successful as we assess he will be, the circumstances under which the current political duopoly formations could resist the type of transformation similar to that as imposed on the Whig Party of the early 19th century. The real question here is whether the Republican Party, as we have known it, is now dead or not? Given demography, some may wonder how it could have existed for so long. History may find that this has been achieved through systemic electoral fraud. This is a history of fraud with which the Democratic Party (DNC) has willingly colluded to ensure that the status quo is maintained.

Trump must be well-pleased with himself for getting away with the incessant moral and legal challenges he has mounted to the system. For example, no president has thus far, been subjected to an impeachment conviction but continued to successfully seek the party’s banner in a coming election. But nobody even mentions this fact. Such is the gravamen of existential challenges to the duopoly as presented by Trumpism.

Maybe, he was right when he voiced his truism that the president’s power is ‘total’. Evidently, his most loyal supporters, the fascist-Christian-evangelicals; court systems well populated by Trump loyalists; that critical mass of Euro-Americans whose every sinew is racist; the silent corporate elites who support both duopoly factions; and a bevy of supine congressmen and senators are now well-prepared to set-sail any remaining notions about ‘democracy’, ‘liberty’, ‘freedom’ down the Potomac River. The Potomac two-step on full display!

Trump has instilled such a perverse party ‘discipline’ that a Martian visiting Earth and landing on this convention would not believe that there is currently a pandemic and that north of 200,000 Americans, based on excess deaths statistics, lay dead. Even as a coterie of buffoons feels confident enough to compel a populace to believe that what is real is indeed fiction and that fiction is reality. Oh, where is George Orwell when needed most!

Internationally, the Dictator-in-Chief has wielded his fascist powers with ruthless efficiency. We could list the countries. They include Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, Belarus, Palestine, Syria and more. In the case of Guyana he, with hidden hands, was able to deploy CARICOM and the OAS to overturn an election and install the PPP on the basis that one of his associates in Washington was a paid consultant to the Jagdeo gang. What is currently happening at the so-called Republican National Convention has more to do with the future of empire and the fortunes of the Caribbean than anything happening in this region currently.

Of course, we expect Trump will be the next president. This we see as highly possible regardless to who wins the most votes, who gains the larger number of delegates in the Electoral College or what the exit-polling may suggest. A Biden victory will merely delay the inevitable. The American fascist dictator has already laid the predicate in order to question any adverse result. Before that, we are guaranteed an enhanced panoply of uniquely American electoral fraudulent measures, maybe by both sides, measures already in play. Will CARICOM and the OAS interfere like they did in Guyana or Bolivia?

Even if by some miracle Biden were to win, it would be another significant hurdle to get Trump out of the White House, physically. Biden is wrongly persuaded that the military brass will expel Trump under these circumstances. Given recent events outside this very White House and the irrational refusal of all elements of the military to arrest Donald Trump and subject him to a military tribunal on treason charges, we are not inclined to concur with Biden.

Trump has never followed any tradition or lawful requirement. He breaks more laws before breakfast that the criminals in his dungeons, it has been said. Also, he is much too fearful of going to jail, like he must, if a sense of political decency is to be re-established in Washington DC. We are therefore left to loiter on the good graces of ordinary citizens in an unlikely quest of removing a political carbuncle from the body politic.

We have been reminded that the Constitution requires the Speaker of the House, Pelosi, to assume the interim-presidency should there be long-lasting election uncertainty going beyond January 20th, 2021, as Trump is threatening with blatant interference in the USPS. But even if it were to come to this, we would fail to see any circumstances where the incumbent, Donald J. Trump would recognize her (Pelosi’s) existence. He may even have her arrested should she venture anywhere near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The fatal flaw is the American political culture requiring the presumptive loser to accept defeat will serve merely to ignite deeper social discord and further the aims of the fascists. This is an environment Trump lives for and is clearly willing to ignite a civil war if necessary.

The classical definition of fascism has been the conjoining of political and economic forces, an unholy alliance. However, what we see emerging here through the use of processes to further disempower the masses and enrich the few is a more virulent formation than understood by the traditional definition. Lewis and Long argued well that when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag. However, this writer is still left in wonderment that such a monster, from the cesspool of American fascism, would arise in our own lifetimes, at the centre of empire, even as we have always been acutely aware of the very nature of American political culture, which has always been fascistic at its core. We are left to wrestle with the internal contradictions.