Previous: Part I - The Climate Difference
In the Part I of Upend the Election that I had not anticipated writing, I set forth one valid reason that progressives might have to vote for the Biden-Harris ticket in the presidential election: the stark difference between Trump-Pence and Biden-Harris regarding climate change. In this Part II, I will return to what was my original thesis: the fundamental identity of Trump and Biden on the large political issues facing the electorate gives many progressives - myself included - manifold valid reasons to not vote for Joe Biden, and either not vote or vote for some other candidate. In my case, that would be Howie Hawkins of the Green Party.
Loyal Democrats and Never Trumper Republicans lose their minds when you criticize the Biden-Harris ticket or even hint at not voting for them. Instantly you are either a Russian asset or a Trumper. They simply cannot comprehend that you might have real political positions that make the decision between Trump and Biden of no consequence to you. They cannot conceive of any set of facts in which voting your conscience does not mean voting for Biden. To them, the choice between Trump and Biden is a contest “for the soul of the nation” between fascism and democracy. To not vote for Biden is to vote for Trump.
Let me educate you on why Trump vs. Biden - aside from climate change as discussed in Part I - makes no difference to me, and to millions of other Americans. In fact, Trump vs. Biden makes no real difference to all of you reading this, whether you believe that or not. Why? Because they both represent the same people, they both have the same positions on all the policies - again, other than climate change - that effect the people of this world, and they both would sooner lock you up than have the government you pay for give you one ounce of assistance. Neither of them represents you; neither one of them will serve your interests; neither one of them gives one solitary tiny little fuck about you.
Before we get to specific policies, let us make clear that both Trump and Biden represent the Capitalist class. Both of them pretend to their base that they do not. Trump told the electorate during the 2016 election that a small elite of very wealthy people controls the world, and he intimated that he would fight for the workers of America against that elite. The first part was true; the second was a lie. From the moment he got into office, he has set about to give that ruling elite everything that it wants: Massive tax cuts, the destruction of the regulatory state, whatever infusion of public funds is needed to keep the stock market soaring, the continued emasculation of labor, and the suppression of the citizenry’s ability to fight back. Why? Because he wants to be one of them. He is that kid who wants to be let into the Cool Kids Clique, so he sucks up to them and does whatever ignominious tasks they assign him so that they will let him in. The joke is on him, because they all laugh at him, and he will never be one of them.
Biden began his political career back around 1970 by literally declaring that he would “prostitute” himself to the ruling class to get elected. He came right out and said that he would sell himself for campaign contributions. He has spent his entire political career living up to that ambitious beginning. He has spent his entire political career trying to prove how conservative he is by taking part in crafting and passing legislation that locks people up - primarily young Black men; publicly declaring his willingness to slash public entitlements like Social Security and Medicare and in the halls of government seeking to enter into bargains to do just that; fighting for legislation on behalf of the credit card companies that own his home state that would lock millions of Americans into debtor servitude; fronting for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries; helping to draft the single most momentous piece of surveillance state legislation in American history and being part of an Administration that ruthlessly suppressed rights of protest and whistleblowers; publicly shilling for and voting for war after war, including the Iraq War when he later admitted that he did not believe there were weapons of mass destruction - telling on himself for lying at the time that he campaigned for a war that destroyed a state and killed a million Iraqis as well as thousands of Americans; and being part of a foreign policy establishment that destroyed civil order in Latin American state after Latin American state and created the immigration “crisis” that led first Obama and now Trump to lock kids in cages.
All of those actions were at the behest of the people from whom he has accepted millions upon millions on top of millions of dollars over the course of a 50-year career. At the beginning of this presidential campaign he told a room of those men that were he to win the Presidency “nothing would fundamentally change” as he asked them for more money. Just recently, he reiterated that pledge to them.
“Nothing will fundamentally change.” Why, if a person believes in his heart and with every rational thought in his brain on the basis of everything he accepts as fact in this world that fundamental change is needed NOW to prevent mass destruction and provide a decent life for the people of this planet, would that person have any interest in voting for a candidate who says that “nothing will fundamentally change”?
So both candidates represent the Capitalist class, a class of people who have demonstrated quite clearly that they are perfectly willing to let the rest of us die to keep the billions flowing into their bank accounts. In fact, they will do whatever it takes to avoid even a small slowing in the flow of billions into their bank accounts.
Neither of them represents you or me. If you think one of them does, then you are a fool.
Setting aside for the moment the fundamental structural changes in the global order that I believe are necessary to provide a decent future for mankind, little distinguishes Trump and Biden on the political issues that are of paramount importance to me. I will begin with the one that currently grips my emotions and serves as closest to a litmus test for me. I will then move on to address the other critical issues.
Health Care
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic threw the injustice, inefficiency and inhumanity of the American health care system into stark relief, the issue had become a bit of a litmus test for me. It wasn’t “do you support the Green New Deal?” that I wanted to know from any candidate asking for my support; it was “do you support Medicare For All?” Now, I don’t like the branding of “Medicare For All” because it is a misnomer that gives inaccurate signals to certain segments of the electorate, and prefer to call it “Health Care For All”, but whatever we call it, we are referring to a single-payer universal health care system, where a government entity is the only health insurer in the market.
Both candidates, both parties reject Health Care For All. The only difference is the numbers of people the candidates want to subject to lack of health care and untimely death. Biden is ok with 68,000 people dying unnecessarily each year and 10 million people being without health care; for Trump the numbers are much higher. Although, I will say, I think for both of them the number is immaterial: they don’t care and they’ve never even thought of how many people die. I believe that to both of them, people other than themselves are mere abstractions.
For those of us who hate the American system and its willingness to let thousands of people die and millions suffer every year so that insurance, pharmaceutical and medical industry executives and investors can rake in billions of dollars they do not need, the differences between the two candidates’ positions make little to no difference - especially if Biden is going to ditch a public option. Neither one of them will come close to solving the problem, both of them are committed to perpetuating the problem.
Income Inequality
The always-wide gulf in income and wealth between the ruling class and the working class was becoming oceanic for 35 years before Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States - 35 years during which Joe Biden was an integral part of the political system that enabled that growing gap between the workers and the owners of the means of production, 35 years during which Joe Biden did everything in his power to assist that tectonic shift. His campaign has already signaled that he will continue to detonate bombs in the fault when he becomes President.
Early in the primary campaign, Bernie Sanders supporters warned that once the Republicans were thrown out of office, they would begin screaming about the “federal budget deficit” that they created, and a Biden Administration would be an eager co-conspirator in imposing good old-fashioned neoliberal austerity measures.
Sure enough, the nominating convention was not even done, and Republicans had not even begun to scream, when the Biden campaign signaled its readiness to continue the pattern of Republican administrations creating massive deficits with tax cuts for the wealthy and expensive wars and Democratic administrations balancing the budget by raising taxes on the middle class and slashing social spending:
And there it is: yet another “We tried to warn you” that the Sanders movement will be able to offer to the American people.
The Biden Administration will no more offer a meaningful stimulus to the American people, no more back a program to help the working classes recover their lost wealth (much less improve wealth), than did the Obama Administration after the Great Recession caused by The Great Looting.
Imposing austerity now is a disastrous, insane policy that will have tragic consequences, but it is entirely consistent with the playbook of both parties, a playbook that has led to 40 years of remorseless wealth transfer from the working classes to the Capitalist class:
Team Biden Now Signals Austerity, Despite Campaign Pledges, David Sirota
Joe Biden is already planning a failed presidency, Ryan Cooper
Biden’s Next Job Is to Convince America That He Means It, John Nichols
For his entire career, Joe Biden has supported the trade, labor and tax policies that enabled the wealth transfer. He has eagerly and ably done the bidding of his owners - I mean donors. He is now signaling them that he will indeed carry through on his most cherished and important campaign promise: that nothing will fundamentally change, nobody’s standard of living will be affected.
Is it really necessary to discuss Trump’s position on this issue?
American Imperialism
The American Enterprise Institute asked, “Would Biden’s foreign policy really be much different from Trump’s?” then proceeded to tick through the list of current foreign policy issues and concluded,
In short, it’s not easy to find areas of substantive disagreement between Trump and nominal Biden foreign policy…. At least as far as national security is concerned, a Biden presidency may well on balance represent continuity with the Trump administration – a more pleasant, less mercurial, but fundamentally the same US foreign policy.
Now, I’m no advocate or fan of the right-wing think tank, but I appreciate somebody saving me some work. Beneath all the warm fuzzy rhetoric, Joe Biden remains an ardent American imperialist committed to great power competition with Russia and China, and promoting right wing repression and Capitalist exploitation all over the globe - particularly in American “spheres of influence.”
If anything, from an anti-imperialist perspective, Biden is arguably worse than Trump. The current president at least campaigned on a retreat from American imperialism, criticizing the wars, and he has led a less interventionist foreign policy (incrementally). While a Senator, Biden supported every opportunity for war that came along, and as Vice President, he enacted a foreign policy everywhere Obama gave him autonomy that would make an old CIA hand proud. “The Biden Plan” for Colombia and later for Central America supported Corruption, Austerity and Privatization in Colombia with massive aid to the murderous Colombian security apparatus, then imposed those same features on Honduras through a coup overthrowing a democratically-elected government and imposition of American-supported right-wing government on the people. It was Joe Biden’s rule that created the massive waves of migration toward the US border.
Max Blumenthal and The Grayzone investigated and wrote a brilliant exposé of “The Biden Plan” and its tragic consequences for the people of Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. With apologies to The Grayzone, I am going to quote the heart of that piece as relevant to this column:
Sold by the vice president as a panacea to a worsening migration crisis, the Alliance for Prosperity was a boon for international financial institutions which promised to deepen the economic grief of the region’s poor….
[T]he Plan would further enrich and strengthen the political power of the very same elites whose [greed], deliberate subversion of the rule of law, and destruction of natural resources and of Indigenous and campesino land rights, were responsible for the dire conditions the proposal ostensibly addressed,” [said professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz Dana] Frank….
In Honduras, the government had no capacity or will to resist Biden’s plan. That is because the country’s elected president, Juan Manuel Zelaya, had been removed in 2009 in a coup orchestrated by the United States.
As Zelaya told The Grayzone’s Anya Parampil, the Obama administration was infuriated by his participation in ALBA, a regional economic development program put forward by Venezuela’s then-President Hugo Chavez that provided an alternative to neoliberal formulas like the so-called “Biden Plan.”
Following the military coup, a corporate-friendly administration was installed to advance the interests of international financial institutions, and US trainers arrived in town to hone the new regime’s mechanisms of repression.
Under the auspices of the Central American Regional Security Initiative, the FBI was dispatched to oversee the training of FUSINA, the main operational arm of the Honduran army and the base of the Military Police for Public Order (PMOP) that patrols cities like an occupation force. [Emphasis added]
This passage outlines vintage American imperialism. People of a non-European nation have the temerity to choose a government that attempts to provide for their needs instead of further enriching the local Capitalist elite and international finance; United States overthrows elected government and installs right-wing dictatorship; United States trains security forces in more efficient oppression; US-supported dictators impose Corruption, Austerity and Privatization on the people; local Capitalist elite and international financial and corporate interests profit while people suffer and seek to migrate.
Everywhere Joe Biden put his thumb as Vice President, democracy died and corruption flourished:
Obama gave him autonomy over Ukraine policy. In 2014 the United States backed a coup that overthrew the democratically elected government. A Ukrainian oligarch connected to the new government stole much of the IMF loans to Ukraine, which the Ukrainian people will have to repay and Joe’s son was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company that the UK government accused “of stealing at least $23 million of Ukrainian taxpayers’ money.”
In Iraq, after elections gave an opposition leader the most seats in the legislature - but not a majority - Biden backed the corrupt prime minister who then destroyed the Iraqi security system and cleared the way for ISIS to take over most of the country. Once again, Biden friends get rich, the people get worsened poverty and crumbling civil institutions.
Under a Biden Administration, America will continue to mouth lofty phrases about human rights while ignoring brutal repression of the people and enforcement of Capitalist exploitation wherever American power can be projected. While the Biden Administration will be nicer to our allies and rejoin international organizations, it will all remain in the service of extracting the world’s resources for the ever-increasing wealth of the global Capitalist class.
Racial Justice and Immigration
We have been told that politicians change, and that Biden’s record in the past does not tell us what he would do as President. Now, the people who have told us this were trying to browbeat us into voting for him, but the logic of the argument seems to contradict what we expect in everyday life, that how a person has behaved to this point in his life is probably the best indicator of how he will act today and tomorrow.
This debate is important because whether Joe Biden will be the President of his current platform - and Kamala Harris will be the Vice President/President of the current platform - or the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of their careers up to this point makes a huge difference. The platform claims to care about black lives and want racial justice. The platform claims to be humane to immigrants. By contrast, Biden’s entire career and Harris’s career as a prosecutor in California were atrocious on racial justice issues, including immigration. Unlike climate, where Biden’s record and political constellation are mixed and do give some indication that he could follow through on his platform, and foreign policy where he explicitly says he will return to neoliberal internationalism and push his same “Biden Plan” policies on Latin America, The Biden platform on domestic justice issues and his most recent public statements give a progressive little reason to believe a Biden-Harris Administration will be any different than what we would expect from the architect of mass incarceration and “California’s Top Cop.”
I lumped “racial justice” and “immigration” together because both issue areas involve the relationship between United States governments and people residing in or seeking to reside in the United States whose genetic makeup is not entirely European in origin. Joe Biden’s primary response to such citizens throughout his career has been to lock them up, and the primary response of the presidential administration in which he served to such “wannabe citizens” was to send them back from whence they came. Latin Americans came to call Obama “the deporter in chief” because of the zeal with which his DHS rounded them up and sent them back.
The corporate press Trumpeted the “kids in cages” story when it was Trump in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, conveniently ignoring that photos they used were taken during the Obama Administration - which built the fucking cages in the first place. The Democratic Party lie continues to this day, with Michelle Obama, Queen Hypocrite, attacking Trump for the kids in cages. The Associated Press exposed the lie the following day.
Whether Biden stops the wall or continues the wall, removes the Muslim immigrant ban or lets it stay in place, pushes for citizenship for “Dreamers” or never gets around to it, as long as CBP and ICE are operating, the face America shows to immigrants will be the harsh face of fascism. Similarly, as long as the federal government is funding the police forces we have witnessed brutalizing peaceful protestors for four months now, in cities across the country, while continuing to murder black Americans, it doesn’t matter what words Joe Biden says in Washington, D.C., the true face of America to its black citizens will be the harsh face of fascism.
Joe Biden shows no remorse for the oppressive police state he helped build, for the mass incarceration he enshrined in law, for the war on drug users he eagerly collaborated with from the very beginning and fought to expand throughout the 80s and 90s, for the militarization of local police forces he enabled. While a wave of marijuana legalization sweeps the nation and a solid majority of American adults now support legalization, Biden adamantly refuses to let it be part of the Party platform. As calls from local communities rise to defund the police departments - which does NOT mean an end to law enforcement and criminal investigations - and drastically reduce the police presence in minority neighborhoods while funding social services instead, Biden gives interviews and [ghost-]writes op-eds in USA Today saying he does NOT support defunding the police, instead declaring that he wants to give the police MORE money, $300 million MORE federal money.
This is just another area where nothing is going to change under a Biden Administration other than the face of the old white man justifying oppression of people of color by America, and the words he uses in his speeches and interviews. The police might have to find new ways to murder blacks if their chokeholds are taken away, but they are creative sorts, I’m sure they’ll find a way.
Democracy
The election of Joe Biden is supposed to save American Democracy from the existential threat of Donald Trump, but the Democratic Party’s nominating process has hardly proven itself a model of democracy, and Biden’s legislative and political record demonstrate a very loose commitment to many of the principles underlying democracy.
One of the most delicious ironies of modern American politics is how America has forgotten - and never really paid attention to in the first place - that the emails whose leak supposedly undermined democracy and helped Trump get elected, spawning “Russiagate”, detailed the machinations of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders. To be blunt, they bust Clinton and the Party for cheating. It was more of the same when a combination of back room dealing and all of the mechanisms of vote manipulation the Democrats are prepared to scream about in November, other than armed right-wing thugs at the polls, were used to make sure Bernie Sanders did not win the nomination. Naïve and credulous Democratic voters will never believe it but their nominating process is as anti-democratic as they come.
Joe Biden was nominated because a congressman who is even more bought by pharmaceutical companies than he is endorsed him; all his corporatist rivals were strong-armed into dropping out and endorsing him on the same night; the most deceitful and disloyal fauxgressive in American political history backstabbed Sanders; billionaires spent millions of dollars on deceptive attack ads; the corporate media relentlessly pounded false and Trumped up themes against Sanders; polling locations in areas that were expected to vote heavily for Sanders were closed, underprepared and malfunctioning, leading to enormous lines; exit polls deviated from official results in all the early states to degrees beyond those seen in the most openly fraudulent states in the world; and more. A tidal wave of corruption swept Biden to the nomination despite his obviously melting brain and his horrendous career.
It’s fitting that a corrupt process nominated Biden given the miasma of corruption that surrounds him. Andrew Cockburn highlighted how Biden’s family seems to get rich and his “charities” give more to their executives and officers than they actually give in charity. The whole Ukraine thing that got Trump impeached was - as ironic as the Hillary’s emails scandal - launched by Biden’s “son Hunter’s involvement in that nation’s business affairs via his position on the board of Burisma, a natural gas company owned by a former Ukrainian ecology minister accused by the UK government of stealing at least $23 million of Ukrainian taxpayers’ money.” Biden epitomizes the “swamp” Trump conned 60 million Americans into thinking he wanted to “drain.” Biden’s corruption enables Trump’s demagoguery.
We’ve already seen how dedicated Biden was to “democracy” in Iraq, Ukraine and Central America. We’ve already seen how it was the Obama-Biden Administration that built the cages and put the kids in them in the first place. We’ve already seen how Biden was a central architect of the Drug War and War on Crime that began and accelerated the sapping of the Bill of Rights and the rise of the militarized police. And here is the place to bring up that he wrote the prototype of the Patriot Act and tried to get it passed in 1995, then was one of the leading cheerleaders for the actual Patriot Act in 2001 after the World Trade Center bombing had brought American public opinion around to his way of thinking. Joe Biden wrote the law that created the modern surveillance state, and was part of the Administration that persecuted whistleblowers who made public its extent and abuses. He wrote the laws and set the precedents that enable everything Trump does.
And THIS is who is going to save American Democracy from Trump?
Conclusion
Progressives who respond to the above litany of horrors by hesitating to declare their vote for Biden are accused of “purity tests” or “helping Trump.” Not voting for Biden is the same as voting for Trump, #BlueMAGA and #NeverTrumpers scream, which is, of course, horseshit. If white Americans had a social conscience and working class Americans had the intelligence to recognize and vote for their political economic interests, it wouldn’t be a choice between whatever horseshit the Democratic National Committee puts on a plate and “helping Trump”, or “helping Bush”, or “helping Reagan.” And if not being ok with supporting politicians who oppose everything you stand for, who are ok with causing or allowing hundreds of thousands of deaths every year and the open oppression of billions of people - including their fellow countrymen - is a “purity test” to you, then you lack the discernment to tell the difference between basic principles and bumper sticker slogans. Of course, that defines the majority of the American electorate.
The simple truth is that whether Trump is president or Biden is, the poor black and sick are going to continue to die by the thousands from the lack of basic health care functioning states ensure their citizens; the Capitalist class is going to continue to hoard billions upon billions more each year while millions die, billions suffer and the planet burns; the U.S. military and intelligence machines are going to continue to murder poor brown people around the globe and destroy democratically-elected governments so the Capitalist class can continue to feed its greed at an ever-increasing rate; police are going to continue to murder black people and enforce white supremacy; and elections are going to continue to be sham contests between Dumb and Dumberer.
Given all that, is it any wonder that Did Not Vote is going to win yet another presidential election?
Next: Part III - Why Green Could Win