Campaign rally from the gates of hell<\/strong><\/p>\n Full of fire and brimstone, Biden\u2019s \u201cBattle for the Soul of the Nation\u201d lecture<\/a> on September 1 was made against a demonic background illuminated by a fiery red glow. \u201cBurning inside each of us\u2026[t]hat sacred flame still burns.\u201d<\/p>\n He was dressed in an impeccably tailored midnight blue suit with the obligatory imperial flag pin in the lapel as is appropriate for the CEO of the capitalist world.<\/p>\n Behind the silhouetted leader stood a guard of two imperial stormtroopers. These are the brethren who visited the Halls of Montezuma and came back with over half of the sovereign territory of our neighbor to the south. These are the boys who occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933 and only left after they installed the murderous Somoza dictatorship to do their duty work.<\/p>\n These optics are not the image of what democracy looks like, I fear, but could be the foreshadowing of a far more authoritarian future.<\/p>\n Demonizing the opposition<\/strong><\/p>\n Trump and those who voted for him, roughly half of the US electorate, are demonized. We are warned that these undesirables \u201c\u2026promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.\u201d<\/p>\n The speaker, Joe Biden, allows that while some Republicans are \u201cdestroying American democracy,\u201d not all \u201crepresent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.\u201d He gushes that he has been \u201cable to work with these mainstream Republicans.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, on most matters of US imperialism and the surveillance state, there is little daylight<\/a> between one side of the aisle. Both wings of the two-party duopoly connive and conspire against working people.<\/p>\n So why the demonization? The reason is that other than flaunting that he is not Trump, Mr. Biden has precious little to offer as his administration reaches its midpoint.<\/p>\n Living and dying with COVID<\/strong><\/p>\n Despite having a trifecta (control of both houses of congress and the presidency) the Democrat\u2019s campaign finds that it has to fall back twelve long years ago to crow about Obamacare. Glossed over is the scandal that even in the time of COVID, the richest nation in the world could not enact universal health care.<\/p>\n Speaking of which, Biden had the audacity to say: \u201cBut today, COVID no longer controls our lives.\u201d Yes, under Biden, we have learned to live \u2013 or more accurately die \u2013 with COVID. Over a million Americas have perished from the disease compared to 15,000 in China. And the US death rate<\/a> continues at about 400 per day.<\/p>\n As Jim Naureckas points out<\/a> in FAIR, <\/em>\u201clife expectancy in the US has now dropped below that of China \u2013 76.1 vs. 77.1 years\u201d in part due to COVID mortalities. Yet despite the lockdowns in China, \u201cChina is expected to be 13.8% richer at the beginning of 2023 than it was when the pandemic began \u2013 whereas the US will be just 3.4% better off.\u201d<\/p>\n Abortion rights<\/strong><\/p>\n The last time that the Democrats enjoyed a trifecta was when Biden was first swept into the White House as Obama\u2019s VP. Back then, the Democrats campaigned to pass the Freedom of Choice Act to prevent judicial obliteration of reproductive freedom.<\/p>\n Despite their promise to \u201ccodify Roe<\/em>\u201d the first thing in office, it never happened. It turns out that abortion rights was just too good an issue for the Democrats to make it safe. People who supported abortion rights were a captured constituency with nowhere else to go, so they could be betrayed.<\/p>\n As Jim Kavanagh explains<\/a> in Counterpunch<\/em>:<\/p>\n The Democratic Party knows exactly what it\u2019s doing when it repeatedly supports and promotes anti-abortion-rights candidates against abortion-rights supporters \u2013 like Tim Kaine in 2016, Henry Cuellar this year, and its current leader, Joe Biden, who for years said that Roe \u2018went too far\u2019 and supported a constitutional amendment to overturn it, because he did not \u2018think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Democrats herald \u201cRoe<\/em>-vember\u201d to rally the faithful, but abortion-rights advocates will be best served by relying on building the mass movement for reproductive choice.<\/p>\n Incredulous claims<\/strong><\/p>\n Biden\u2019s democracy lecture incredulously claimed: \u201cThis is a nation that respects free and fair elections.\u201d He should have added the caveat that the people have to vote the right way.<\/p>\n As former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said<\/a>: \u201cI\u00a0don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.\u201d Today, the US does not recognize the democratically elected governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua precisely because the people irresponsibly elected socialists.<\/p>\n Biden sermonized: \u201cWe honor the will of the people. We do not deny it.\u201d In practice, however, both Republicans<\/a> and Democrats<\/a> work from their respective partisan sinecures to suppress the vote.<\/p>\n Biden\u2019s jibe against Trump\u2019s allegation that the 2020 election was stolen should be put into the context of the everyday bickering of the two major parties. As the ultra-conservative Federalist<\/em> reported<\/a>, based on poll data: \u201cMore Democrats denied that former President Donald Trump won the 2016 election than the people who claimed President Joe Biden wasn\u2019t legitimately elected in 2020.\u201d See this video<\/a> for ten minutes to Hillary Clinton and her co-partisans questioning the legitimacy of the US electoral process when their side loses.<\/p>\n Equally incredulous is the claim: \u201cAnd this is a nation that rejects violence as a political tool.\u201d This from the chief of state of the world\u2019s largest military power with war expenditures<\/a> greater than the next nine competitors. And from the only nation to have deployed nuclear weapons, not to mention from the party within that nation to have unapologetically<\/a> perpetrated that abomination.<\/p>\n A follow-upper on the incredulity spectrum is: \u201cWe can\u2019t allow violence to be normalized in this country.\u201d How about the daily murders<\/a> by police? Or the existence of institutions such as the NSA, FBI, and CIA?<\/p>\n Rivaling that claim is Biden\u2019s boast about climate action: \u201cAnd I believed we could\u2026 save the planet, so we passed the most important climate initiative ever, ever, ever.\u201d While US greenhouse gas emissions dropped<\/a> under climate-skeptic Trump, they increased<\/a> under Biden. With inflating fuel costs and especially since the heating up of the war in Ukraine, Biden has aggressively promoted boosting oil production domestically<\/a> and abroad<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the claim that really takes the cake is: \u201cWe\u2019re going to end cancer as we know it.\u201d<\/p>\n Prospects for change within the two-party system<\/strong><\/p>\n Biden ended his lecture from the ironically named<\/a> City of Brotherly Love: \u201cI believe America is at an inflection point \u2013 one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that\u2019s to come after.\u201d<\/p>\n But in reality, if past history is any guidance, the US body politic will experience no such inflection soon.<\/p>\n The Democrats will likely lose their congressional majorities but will gain the convenient excuse that they cannot meet their campaign promises such as ending cancer as we know it, because their \u201chands are tied\u201d by the Republicans. The theatre of two-party politics will continue as both wings of the duopoly acrimoniously contend on social and lifestyle issues and enthusiastically collude on maintaining elite rule.<\/p>The post Biden\u2019s Battle for the Soul of the Nation<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The midterm congressional elections will soon be upon us. We are again told, as we are every two years, that the most important election of our lifetimes is impending. However, this year the stakes appear to be even higher. President Biden instructs us, we are \u201cin a battle for the soul of this nation\u2026the breath, [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post Biden\u2019s Battle for the Soul of the Nation<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[133,50,51],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802245"}],"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\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":802246,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802245\/revisions\/802246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Biden-democracy-speech-e1663270507314.jpg\")
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