{"id":2479,"date":"2020-12-16T08:48:13","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T08:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=139858"},"modified":"2020-12-16T08:48:13","modified_gmt":"2020-12-16T08:48:13","slug":"bidens-cabinet-a-return-to-ruling-class-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/16\/bidens-cabinet-a-return-to-ruling-class-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden\u2019s Cabinet: a Return to Ruling Class Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Insane people who study playing Russian roulette with a well-lubricated and seasoned six-shooter understand that the odds on survival are far greater than the expected 83.3 percent, that is, five out of six. That\u2019s because the single loaded bullet chamber is heavier than the empty chambers and is more likely, after a firm spin, to settle at the bottom, away from the striking pin at the top of the firing mechanism. In essence, you can cheat your fate a bit if you choose to engage.<\/p>\n

Not so with engaging in the periodic electoral games orchestrated by the twin parties of U.S. capitalism. There the result is always 100 percent fatal. All chambers are fully loaded in advance by the ruling rich. Without exception, human needs are subordinated to capitalist profits.<\/p>\n

Capitalism\u2019s horses of the apocalypse<\/strong><\/p>\n

Capitalism\u2019s never-ending imperialist oil and resource wars and sanctions kill millions. Its COVID-19 pandemic now kills 3,000 Americans daily. Its global warming climate crisis threatens near-term mass extinction and daily catastrophes. Its repeated and deepening economic depression cycles render increasing tens and hundreds of millions jobless and hopeless. Its systemic racism relegates countless more to poverty, police brutality and mass incarceration, and its sexism and homophobia subject women and LGBTQI+ people to the lowest rungs of the job market and to discrimination and violence. With this in mind, let\u2019s have a look at what the \u201clesser evil\u201d Democrats have in store for working people.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s \u201cdiversity\u201d cabinet<\/strong><\/p>\n

Biden promised his Democratic Party supporters gender and racial parity in his cabinet appointments. Indeed, he boasted last week, \u201cI\u2019m not going to tell you now exactly what I\u2019m doing in any department, but I promise you, it\u2019ll be the single most diverse cabinet, based on race, color and gender that\u2019s ever existed in the United States of America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden, the racist bigot of yesteryear and friend of Strom Thurmond, went further a day earlier, with CNN reporting that he \u201cplans to meet with the board of the NAACP to make it clear he\u2019s listening to their myriad concerns as he plays a complex game of chess.\u201d \u201cChess,\u201d in the view of the ruling rich at the moment, is their version of \u201cidentity politics\u201d conducted exclusively among and between the elite few, in which female, Black and Brown trustees are chosen to guard and promote the pure interests of the ruling class.<\/p>\n

Four-star General Lloyd J. Austin III, recently retired from the Army in 2016, is president-elect Joseph Biden\u2019s choice for Secretary of Defense, vetted by Biden\u2019s transition team which includes at least four retired generals or admirals and a host of representatives of the billionaire elite. Biden no doubt appreciated the fact that his campaign prominently featured lengthy lists of well-connected military and national security specialists as well as billionaire contributors that dwarfed those who signed up for President Trump.<\/p>\n

Austin is a member of the private equity fund Pine Island Acquisition Corporation that invests big time in defense contractors and also serves on the Board of Directors of Raytheon Technologies, the world\u2019s third-largest defense contractor.<\/p>\n

A Black man, Austin apparently beat out Mich\u00e8le Flournoy, who was originally slated to head the Pentagon and would have been the first woman to do so.<\/p>\n

Democratic Party\u2019s wars led by Clinton and Obama<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mich\u00e8le Flournoy, in accord with gender balance, was originally slated by Biden for the Secretary of Defense spot. She served as a senior defense advisor to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Under the latter, she helped mastermind the escalation of the war in Afghanistan that took the lives of 500,000 people, mostly civilians. U.S. forces there reached 120,000 under Obama, half of which were private mercenaries of the Blackwater type \u2013 the largest number and percentage in U.S. history.<\/p>\n

In a 2017 Washington Post op-ed<\/a> calling for increased military spending, Flournoy argued that President Trump was \u201cright to raise the need for more defense dollars.\u201d She posited that Obama didn\u2019t use military force enough, particularly in Syria. Enough? 500,000 Syrians died in the course of that U.S.-led, NATO and Gulf State-monarchy-assisted, imperialist regime-change slaughter! Flournoy supported the wars in Iraq and Libya, waged in the name of \u201cweapons of mass destruction\u201d that did not exist (Iraq), and on falsified \u201chumanitarian\u201d grounds (Libya).<\/p>\n

With lucrative ties to defense contractors, she serves on the board of Booz Allen Hamilton, the global strategic and technology consulting firm with more than $2 billion in Defense Department contracts and employing 14 former senior Defense Department officials and Pentagon generals. Literally millions died under her stewardship. But sadly for her, she will not be installed for this mass-murder post.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Anthony Blinken, <\/strong>Biden\u2019s nominee for Secretary of State and another Obama-team veteran, having served as deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state. War hawk Blinken supported the U.S. slaughter and obliteration in Libya and praises to the high heavens the Zionist apartheid state of Israel, including its every atrocity against the Palestinian people.<\/p>\n

Bailing out the corporate elite<\/strong><\/p>\n

Janet Yellen,<\/strong> former Federal Reserve chair under Obama, is today Biden\u2019s pick for Treasury Secretary. She is praised for her advocacy of \u201cextraordinary fiscal support<\/a>\u201d for the corporate elite during the pandemic. Slated to preside over negotiations over the next version of the bi-partisan CARES Act, which gifted unprecedented trillions of dollars to the ruling class, Yellen, under Obama, pioneered \u201cquantitative easing\u201d on steroids, that is, near-zero-interest-rate loans to the super-rich that they reinvested in speculative stock market and related ventures and in time drove financial indexes to record highs while promised \u201cinfrastructure\u201d investments were non-existent.<\/p>\n

But Yellen is a woman, whose record, according to the now-identity-politics-conscious New York Times, included a remark in a 2014 Boston speech referring to the unprecedented \u201cwealth gap\u201d in the U.S. Bless her soul! Yellen noted that the bottom half of the population receives just one percent of the nation\u2019s wealth. She suggested that perhaps the bottom half might work harder to improve their state, or perhaps get some financial assistance to improve their educational opportunities. It never happened. Bottom line? Under Yellen, the top one percent\u2019s share reached historic proportions!<\/p>\n

Climate catastrophe and oil wars<\/strong><\/p>\n

The best that liberal pundits could utter with regard to Biden\u2019s appointment of former Secretary of State John Kerry <\/strong>as special envoy for climate was that \u201cat least he recognizes the science.\u201d Kerry, a carbon tax and cap-and-trade advocate, replete with corporate loopholes galore to be sure, championed Obama\u2019s drive to advance off-shore drilling and to become the world\u2019s number one fracker. During the Obama years the U.S. for the first time became energy independent, in significant part due to the U.S. imperialist oil wars against Iraq, Syria and Libya.<\/p>\n

It was Kerry who presided over the U.S.-orchestrated Riyadh, Saudi Arabia conference, wherein a combination of overtly terrorist groups in concert with the U.S.-backed \u201ccoalition\u201d cabal gathered in a failed effort to dismember Syria at a time when some three-quarters of that beleaguered nation was occupied by U.S., NATO and Gulf State monarchy armed, financed and organized jihadist murderers.<\/p>\n

Drone wars and torture<\/strong><\/p>\n

Avril Haines, a former Obama deputy CIA chief, is another Biden-proposed cabinet appointee. She\u2019s slated to be Biden\u2019s Director of National Intelligence. Haines was among Obama\u2019s top drone program experts, through which murder, execution-style, was delivered from the heavens with impunity, including against U.S. citizens, not to mention at an occasional Yemeni wedding turned into a funeral. The Daily Beast reported in July that Haines was involved in the sham \u201caccountability\u201d process that shielded CIA officials from punishment for their involvement with torture. CIA director Gina Haspel\u2019s nomination was supported by Haines despite Haspel\u2019s direct supervision of U.S. Middle East torture program<\/a>s.<\/p>\n

Sanders opts for Democratic Party payback<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, the Democrats\u2019 leading \u201cprogressive,\u201d who pledged absolute loyalty to Biden\u2019s campaign, was reduced to pleading for the post of Secretary of Labor during a late-November interview with CNN. Sanders pathetically pledged, should he be appointed, that he would work for legislation to increase the percentage of union membership, as if the corporate rich who run the country, having reduced union membership to a 100-year low, would consider such a proposition for a split-second. The notion that real union power emanates from the independent and united mobilizations of the broad working class in alliance with all the struggles of the oppressed and exploited, is alien to Sanders, whose vision of progress resides exclusively in transforming rapacious capitalism from within.<\/p>\n

And Elizabeth Warren? She too is looking for a cabinet appointment, perhaps based on her service to Biden in remaining in the Democratic Party primary contest through the Super Tuesday spectacle that saw the entire party apparatus unite to trash Sanders\u2019s drive for the nomination. Glenn Greenwald reports that Warren\u2019s final primary campaign received some $50 million in dark money to keep her in the running, despite her repeated primary failures, including in her own state of Massachusetts.<\/p>\n

AOC and The Squad counsel Biden caution<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Sanders and Warren maneuver for some Biden payback recognition, other \u201cprogressives\u201d like CNN White House reporter Jeff Zeleny offered up a thumbnail sketch of the \u201cliberal\u201d capitalist mindset. Zeleny noted that that \u201cCongressional super star Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez understands why the Biden team has been cautious in some of their picks so far \u2013 because GOP control of the Senate makes the confirmation process more difficult \u2013 but she urged the Biden team to adopt a more aggressive strategy if Democrats sweep the Georgia Senate runoff.\u201d<\/p>\n

To date, a record $300 million has been pumped into Georgia\u2019s two Senate runoff races, with the Democrats again outspending the Republicans. But the notion that a Democratic Party majority in the U.S. Senate will open the door to any significant change is fundamentally flawed. The Democrats had a majority in both houses of congress under Obama with zero positive results for working people. When it comes to serious politics the so-called progressive congressional Democrats are joined at the hip with their blue dog, \u201ccentrist,\u201d more-overtly reactionary counterparts. Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s \u201cSquad\u201d supported every<\/em> Democrat, blue dogs included, in the 2018 mid-term elections and again in 2020!<\/p>\n

Sanders bites the bullet<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cParty loyalty\u201d found the Democrats united, not only among themselves, but with the Republicans, in passing last year\u2019s tax bill that gifted $1.5 trillion to the ruling rich. The details, hundreds, if not thousands of pages, were worked out behind the scenes by a coterie of ruling class specialists skilled in advancing their masters\u2019 interests. The same with the $6 trillion CARES Act and the new NAFTA accord. The same with the $4.79 trillion 2020 U.S. budget and, in fact, with regard to every significant piece of legislation that touches on ruling class interests.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s appointment of Neera Tanden as Director of the Office of Management and Budget raised some \u201cprogressive\u201d eyebrows. A Hillary Clinton staffer in 2016 and in Biden\u2019s 2020 primary campaign run, Tanden\u2019s focus was on branding Sanders and his supporters as \u201ccrazy leftists.\u201d She led the pack is making clear that Sanders\u2019s tepid \u201cGreen New Deal\u201d and \u201cdemocratic socialism\u201d had no takers among the party\u2019s elite.<\/p>\n

Biden himself was decisive on this matter when he faced Trump in their one-on-one debate. He responded to Trump\u2019s consciously planned provocative red-baiting charge that the Democrats were socialists by proclaiming, \u201cI beat Bernie. I am the Democratic Party.\u201d A grinning Trump, satisfied that he had made his point, responded, almost under his breath, \u201cYou just lost the left.\u201d Sanders, in turn, made sure that his \u201cleft\u201d would stay the Biden course, including, I estimate, when the day comes, approving Tanden as OMB head.<\/p>\n

As Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Tanden\u2019s task is the construction for Biden and the ruling rich of an expected $5 trillion 2021 U.S. budget proposal. This annual multi-thousand-page tome, replete with innumerable charts, graphs, references to myriad previous allocations, includes incorporated budget proposals from all the departments in the executive branch of the government (Defense, Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs).<\/p>\n

The budget constitutes the ruling class\u2019s central economic, social and political objectives and priorities. It is and has always been the ruling class bible \u2013 the sacred scroll that guarantees their absolute ownership, control and distribution of the nation\u2019s wealth. None of the 100 Senators and 435 members of the House of Representatives is likely to have read this tome, drafted by literally hundreds of bureaucrats overseeing the nation\u2019s 15 executive departments, all of whom are beholden to the final approval of the select few chosen by the ruling elite<\/em>. (See Larry Shoup\u2019s book Wall Street\u2019s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2019<\/em> and Peter Phillips\u2019s Giants: The Global Power Elite<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Media trivia disguises capitalist reality<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s sound and fury over whether the Democrats will win in Georgia and thus capture a majority in the U.S. Senate (51-50, including the vice president\u2019s tie-breaking vote), or whether Trump\u2019s Senate Republicans will veto Biden\u2019s cabinet nominees, is nothing less than the idle chatter generated by corporate media pundits assigned to sanctify and legitimize the daily machinations of ruling class politics. Will Biden keep his promise to appoint \u201cthe most diverse cabinet in U.S. history?\u201d Will Bernie vote to approve his \u201carch enemy\u201d Tanden as OMB director? Will the nation\u2019s government be paralyzed due to the split congress? Will Trump return victorious in 2024?<\/p>\n

Those who dabble in such trivia, not to mention those who promote the Democrats as the necessary \u201clesser evils,\u201d exist to justify and support capitalist minority rule. Those who are among today\u2019s ever-questioning and engaged social and economic justice fighters, including the growing majority of 18-34 year-old youth \u2013 58 percent \u2013 who state in poll after poll that socialism, not capitalism, is their preference, are humanity\u2019s future. These are the youth, Black, white and Brown who mobilized in the tens of millions last summer in the face of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, to defend Black lives in the face of systemic racism police terror, who are the movement\u2019s future, the socialist future.<\/p>\n

In time, they will bypass the Bernie Sanders Democratic Party sheepherders and those too-many on the left that have abandoned challenging the capitalist beast. They will rebuild and transform today\u2019s moribund trade unions, unite all social justice struggles and join in the construction of a disciplined, democratic mass revolutionary socialist party to end capitalist rule.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Insane people who study playing Russian roulette with a well-lubricated and seasoned six-shooter understand that the odds on survival are far greater than the expected 83.3 percent, that\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":274,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/274"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2480,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479\/revisions\/2480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}