|
by Donald Monaco
November 02,
2020
from
GlobalResearch Website
Italian version
The
2020 U.S. presidential election
campaign has evolved into a bitter contest between a politician and
a plutocrat, both of whom advance policies that favor the rich.
One is a criminal;
the other is a con artist...
Joseph Biden
is the criminal.
Donald Trump is the con
artist.
The American people will
choose their president on November 3.
What they cannot do is
elect a candidate that will pursue their interests. The two-party
system restricts campaigns to a competition between corporate
Democrats and corporate Republicans, none of whom have
the peoples' interests in mind.
The upcoming election
will allow voters to select which party will rule the country on
behalf of an owning class that has become
obscenely wealthy at the expense of
working people, most of whom face a desperate struggle for survival.
To deceive voters,
candidates use populist rhetoric to conceal plutocratic
rule behind a facade of democratic governance.
U.S. elections ensure
the continuity of plutocratic rule, not its interruption.
That's the essence of
American politics...
No election is
democratic that costs $11 billion to finance.
In a dollar democracy,
the White House is transformed into the most expensive brothel
in America, followed closely by the Capitol Building,
where the prostitutes are more numerous, if not
more profligate.
Stripped of ideological subterfuge, American citizens vote to
select their slave-masters...
By so doing, they
legitimate a government of, by, and for Wall Street banks,
multinational corporations, the military industrial complex and the
national security autocracy.
Popular representation is
a fiction in a government awash in corporate money and ossified by
bureaucratic power.
The election will also sanctify imperialism, as the entire political
establishment is committed to
protecting U.S. 'Empire.'
These truths can
never be told to the electorate.
They must be hidden
within a matrix of ideological deception.
The Democrats
don the mask of identity politics to conceal their allegiance to the
American plutocracy.
They pose as
defenders of economic and social rights for women, sexual
minorities, immigrants, racial minorities, and workers.
The politics of the
'New Democrats' reeks of hypocrisy as their deeds contradict
their words.
For example, under
Barack Obama,
Democrats claimed
to advance the universal rights of women while prosecuting
wars in seven Muslim countries that destroyed the lives of
Afghani, Pakistani, Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, Somali and Yemeni
women, not to mention American women who lost sons and
daughters fighting those wars.
They advocated for
LGBTQ rights while supporting
countries like Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Qatar and Oman that
persecute and execute gay people.
They supported
DACA while expelling record
numbers of undocumented immigrants.
They endorsed voting
rights for minorities while imposing mass incarceration on the
Black and Latino underclass disenfranchising millions of
convicted felons.
They favored a
centrist version of the neoliberal agenda by promoting
international trade agreements, capital flight and corporate
bailouts, to the detriment of American workers.
Lest anyone forget,
Joseph Biden was Barack Obama's vice-president for eight
years and bears full responsibility for the criminality of the
Obama administration.
The Republicans
hide behind the flag and the bible to advance their
vision of free market fundamentalism on behalf of the owning class.
They use the politics
of fear inspiring loyalty from a segment of the population
threatened by globalism, multiculturalism, secularism and
economic insecurity.
They appeal to the
victims of free trade, capital flight and the outsourcing and
offshoring of jobs they say, with some justification, resulted
from the policies of Democrats, despite their complicity in
promoting the mobility of capital.
The Republicans pander to social prejudice in a society they
helped fracture by stoking the fires of racist, xenophobic,
sexist and homophobic prejudice to win support for an extreme
version of the Washington neoliberal consensus they present as
economic liberty.
They favor a
completely privatized economy that will do away with corporate
regulations, reduce taxes on the rich and the corporate sector
and eliminate social benefits, including Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid.
Along with their
Democratic counterparts, the Republicans support a domestic
police state to augment an
interventionist foreign policy based on international
gangsterism and war.
Donald Trump
is the leader of this party of murderers and bandits.
In sum, the Democrats and
Republicans are two militaristic neoliberal parties that manage the
global affairs of the American
plutocracy.
As for the specific
policy choices of the standard bearers, history provides a stark
record of their venality.
Joseph Biden
is an unapologetic interventionist in foreign policy who
promotes aggression and war to maintain the U.S. empire.
He is a self-admitted
Zionist.
He is pro-AIPAC.
He is a war-criminal.
Biden was Barack
Obama's front man in the aftermath of the 2014 coup d'état in
Ukraine that subjugated that country to the IMF and provoked a
civil war.
Along with Obama and
Hillary Clinton, he refused
to condemn the 2009 right-wing coup in Honduras led by graduates
of the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia.
While serving as
Obama's vice-president, he supported
regime change in Libya, dirty
war in Syria, Saudi war in Yemen, and the pivot to Asia.
As a U.S. senator, he
supported Bill Clinton's war in Yugoslavia and
George W. Bush's
war in Iraq.
In the second
presidential debate with Trump, he called the leaders of Russia,
China and North Korea "thugs," a perfect projection of his own
persona.
Domestically, Biden is a 'law and order' Democrat who
masqueraded as a liberal for his entire political career.
He is a
crypto-racist.
He is a globalist who
supported Clinton's NAFTA, Obama's
Trans-Pacific Partnership, and
Reagan's attempt to undercut New Deal legislation.
He supports
fracking, which is good news
for the oil and gas industry.
With 'friends' like
Biden, peace activists, environmentalists, workers and racial
minorities do not need enemies.
Donald Trump
in a member of the owning class.
As a real estate
mogul and celebrity entertainer, he used to buy politicians who
created a tax code that allowed him to pay only $750.00 in
federal income taxes in 2016-2017 and no income taxes in 10 of
the 15 years prior to his becoming president.
Tiring of the hired
help and wanting to advertise his brand name, he
ran for the nation's highest office in
2016 and to the surprise of many, himself included,
won.
Trump was clever enough to exploit popular hatred of
Washington's swamp of corruption and fear of immigrants having
learned the dark arts from his mentor, the notorious Roy Cohn.
He used the fake
right-wing populist rhetoric of Steve Bannon to defeat
the miserable
Hillary Clinton.
Once elected, Trump
failed to deliver on his promise to bring jobs back to the
United States, rebuild the country's infrastructure, build a
wall across the entire Southern border and end the country's
interminable wars.
Trump did give fellow members of his class an astonishing $1.5
trillion in tax cuts to be paid for with deep cuts in Social
Security and Medicare should he be sent to Washington for a
second term.
Militarists can rest
easy, as no cuts are planned for a Pentagon budget that
mushroomed during Trump's first term, with the support of
corrupt Democrats.
Trump has exposed himself as a fraud who traffics in the
politics of illusion. He sells a pollyannaish optimism that is
divorced from social reality.
The American Dream
has become a nightmare for millions who grimly
face the reality of a gutted economy.
That does not stop
the orange billionaire from intoning that his administration
created the greatest economy in the nation's history prior to
the Covid lockdown. It may have
been a great economy for the investor class, but not for
workers.
At heart, Trump is a committed capitalist entrepreneur.
His administration's
economic policies can be characterized as neo-liberalism on
steroids, operating behind a veneer of economic nationalism.
Trump does not oppose
globalization and free trade. He wants a better deal for
American corporations within the globalized economy.
On the domestic
front, he signed executive orders that further deregulate the
financial, fossil fuel, food and nursing home industries.
As a 'law' and
'order' president, Trump repressed Black Lives Matter
protests with the same intensity that Barack Obama repressed
Occupy Wall Street, but with less finesse, an Obama forte,
making himself an easy target for racial justice advocates.
In foreign policy, Trump's 'America First' strategy has caused
him to run afoul of the political and military establishment
because his unorthodox and impulsive approach to foreign
relations is unpredictable.
Policy differences
notwithstanding, Trump is an imperialist commander-in-chief who
defends U.S. empire as ruthlessly as his predecessors, despite
his efforts to befriend Russia and withdraw troops from
Afghanistan.
His attempt to normalize relations
with Russia was subverted by
the national security autocracy and the Democratic party during
Russiagate and Ukrainegate witch-hunts that were
designed to block détente and remove him from office.
The first scheme
succeeded while the second one failed.
Trump's proposal to withdraw troops from Afghanistan was opposed
by Democrats and key members of the Republican establishment who
are firmly committed to anti-Russian aggression that aims to
assert U.S. global hegemony.
His proposal to withdraw troops from Syria was fraudulent, as
those forces were merely deployed to Syrian oil fields in a
blatant display of Imperial aggression.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, Trump continues the U.S. military
occupation of Iraq and support for Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen.
In occupied
Palestine, he moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognized
Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, brokered a peace deal
between the settler state and the United Arab Emirates, and gave
a green light to Benjamin Netanyahu to begin annexation of the
West Bank.
Trump
pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement,
assassinated one of Iran's top generals, and imposed
killer sanctions on that country.
On other fronts, he orders unremitting assaults on socialism in
Venezuela and Cuba, wages trade war with China, and continues
Obama's drone war.
To hide imperial
aggression, he is attempting to have
Julian Assange extradited
to the United States to face charges under the espionage act,
launching a direct assault on the First Amendment's guarantee of
freedom of the press.
The American people
desperately need to face reality by rejecting the politics of
illusion...
The Democrats and
their supporters think that by removing Trump, they will bring
the country together and "Heal America's Soul."
The Republicans think
by re-electing Trump, the economy will rebound and they will
"Make America Great Again."
Both are mistaken...
America's problems are
deeply rooted in the failure of
neoliberal capitalism, a system
that begets,
privation, war and
environmental destruction...
It is globally
unsustainable.
Only systemic
change will save the planet and its people.
Unfortunately, no viable
candidate will appear on the November ballot to offer that option...
|
