{"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":"
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