by Jeff Mackler, published on Socialist Action, July 6, 2024
Despite a week of intense Camp David pre-debate preparation, where President Biden was pumped full with “facts” provided by his $billionaire-backed campaign advisers aimed at demonstrating his administration’s “achievements,” Biden proved incapable of a single coherent explanation of his policies. We’ll leave it to the “experts” to evaluate the intellectual capacities of the elderly. But Biden’s 50-year record as a deal making fixer upper for the ruling class is an informative story in itself. Over the decades he was the Democrats’ bridge between their Southern racist wing and their Northern corporate “liberals,” that is, between the segregationist heirs to the old slavocracy and the Democrat’s “modern” corporate aristocracy.
Democrats debate replacing Biden
With zero political-economic policy differences in sight, the Democratic Party elite are feverishly debating whether Biden just had a “bad night,” as he claims, or whether he has reached the age where some people lose the ability to clearly articulate their thoughts. Neither hypothesis, of course, addresses the fundamentally reactionary nature of US capitalism that was the invisible backdrop to the June 27th 90-minute CNN-hosted “debate.”
Indeed, as we go to press a July 4 New York Times front-page headline read: “Biden Weighs Future As Trump Lead Grows In Fallout From Debate.” The article included the results of a NYT/Siena College poll showing Trump with a six-point lead among likely voters (49 – 43), and an eight-point lead (49 – 41) among registered voters. The Times reportage, and every Times article since, all but announces that Biden’s campaign is finished. The distraught ruling rich are now likely to proceed to find another kept politician to take to the campaign trail to hustle votes and prettify the ruling class’s increasingly discredited politics.
Elected presidents notwithstanding, the fundamentals of these politics are determined by the billionaire and trillionaire ruling class elite who own and control the nation’s banks, corporations, leading financial institutions and the corporate media. Together, they collaborate to create for a largely unwary public a “Truman Show” [Jim Carrey movie] or Potemkin Village reality that presents the heinous policies and practices of the US imperialist beast as democratic, peaceful, and in the broad interests of the vast majority. Some one-third of the eligible electorate declined to participate in the 2020 elections. Indeed, minus the 2020 voting statistics, usually close to a majority don’t vote at all!
US presidents don’t decide basic US policy
“The rich don’t pay taxes,” Biden proclaimed during his 2020 presidential run, striking a populist pose aimed at working class voters. Here Biden was on the mark, fully aware of what every politician understands and abides by as an unwritten condition of holding office. That congress has been near unanimous in approving multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for the rich only – under Trump and Biden and Obama and Clinton – is carefully stricken from the public debates. Indeed, a handful of ruling class-appointed “tax experts” privately write and re-write the hundreds, if not thousands of pages of tax code regulations to the advantage of corporate America, with but a handful of politicians, if any, viewing the texts not to mention challenging the details.
Biden was correct during the debate in proudly asserting that the US military is the strongest in the world. He neglected to note that this military-industrial complex maintains 1100 military bases in some 100 countries around the world, daily raining death and destruction in its overt and covert wars, drone wars, “Special Operation” secret wars, sanction wars, assassination/death squad wars and embargo/blockade wars. No US president oversees these wars. Yet, they are all an integral part of US imperialist policy as with today’s US-financed genocide in Palestine or its slaughter of millions during the US wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. A polite Biden publicly admitted during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan that the war was a “mistake.” He neglected to mention that this 20-year “mistake” cost the lives of two million Afghans!
The Times calls for Biden to step down
A week following the Biden-Trump “debate,” The New York Times,the nation’s leading corporate “paper of record” was replete with scores of articles excoriating Biden’s personal performance. A few days later, a formal Times editorial advised Biden to accede to the growing chorus of his $billionaire backers – many of whose names they printed – to relinquish his expected Democratic Party National Convention certification. In this writer’s view it is more than likely that Biden will step down, leaving the field clear for the corporate media and super rich to maneuver to manufacture consent as to who will replace him. To be sure, however, no candidate will fundamentally differ from the politics of Genocide Joe Biden. Not a single potential replacement differs fundamentally with his unqualified backing and funding of the Zionist genocide of the Palestinian masses. Not one favors a dime’s cut in the annual trillion dollar military budget! War is good for profits! Endless wars are even better!
The rich run the country not the politicians
The ruling rich are skilled in running the country whether their leading candidate is a former movie star (Reagan) or dull-witted son of the billionaire elite (George W. Bush) or former southern racists-turned liberal (Carter and Clinton) or crude bigoted billionaire morons (Trump) or fake civil rights leaders (Obama).
Reagan, with senility in his final year, remained a cloistered president. When Bush was informed by his Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chair, as they hurriedly stopped by his office with two pieces of paper in hand outlining a trillion dollar bailout for the nation’s collapsing banks, that unless congress immediately passed this massive corporate bailout proposal, drafted by some dozen of the nation’s leading bankers, [The Times later featured photo of the assembled billionaire bankers.] the US economy would instantly collapse, Bush responded, “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” The bi-partisan trillion dollar bank bailout bill passed a day or two later!
The “moron” Trump
When then president Trump privately told the National Security Council that the US should increase its tactical nuclear weapons capacity 100 fold, then Secretary of State and former Exxon Mobile CEO, Rex Tillerson, after Trump had left the room, stated, “The guy is a “f*****g moron.” My guess is that no one disagreed!
These examples are only to illustrate that US presidents don’t run the country. On every fundamental issue the major political, economic and social decisions are made behind the backs of the American people by a tiny core of the US ruling class elite who expend some $8 billion [2020 figures] every four years in the rigged US election process.
Biden and Trump’s bluster and bluff, outright lies and ever-deepening atrocities perpetrated against the world’s people and the environment, are barely-polished capitalist propaganda aimed at camouflaging the stark reality of a world capitalist system in deep crisis.
Bi-partisan environmental destruction
Biden’s trillion dollar “Infrastructure Bill” claimed to be an unprecedented move to counter the oncoming fossil fuel-induced climate catastrophe was little more than gift to corporate America’s construction industry. Bernie Sanders’ counterposed, inadequate, but more serious $16 trillion Green New Deal, over ten years, was ditched even though every serious scientist today asserts that the UN and COP warnings that a world temperature increase of 1.5 C over pre-industrial levels spells irreversible doom for humanity. Today, that 1.5 C increase has already been reached! While blustering Trump denies a climate crisis outright and had the US withdraw from COP, Biden led the world in issuing offshore drilling permits while the US fossil fuel production increased, today almost exceeding all other nations combined.
US fossil fuel wars
The 2014 fascist-led US-backed Ukraine coup was nothing less than a US imperialist/oil monopoly-backed move to substitute US fossil fuel for Russia’s, with the later previously being Western Europe’s main supplier. The US blowing up Russia’s Nordstream pipeline to Germany was part of the deal, yet another oil war as with the US wars, embargoes and coups engineered against Venezuela and Iran, the nations with world’s first and second largest oil reserves, endlessly coveted by US imperialism.
Trump’s racist bluster about deporting immigrants was more than matched by Biden’s recent racist vote-seeking anti-immigrant proposals to Congress, not to mention Biden’s (and Obama before him) well-earned reputation as yet another Democratic Party “Great Deporter.”
Twin party “casino capitalism”
Trump bragged about the stock markets’ rise under his presidency, a rise that produced a new generation of billionaires. But Biden and Obama engineered the Federal Reserve’s historic near-zero interest rate “loans” to the corporate elite, who instantly turned around the government’s “free money” to drive the “casino” capitalist stock markets to historic highs, with zero correspondence to lagging corporate profit rates.
China and the World Trade Organization
It was Obama and the Democrats who engineered China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization, conditioned on China allowing US corporations free reign to offshore production to a promised near tax free Chinese environment and to the then lowest wage levels in the world. US corporations happily invested in Chinese dormitory garment factories with a required 80-hour workweek at six cents per hour for teenage women! Two decades later, China, with its near inexhaustible supply of low wage labor, today exceeds the US in the number of billionaires, with one thousand, as compared to some 800 in the US.
Today, with capitalist and imperialist China’s economy ranking second in the world, competing with US corporations across the globe and based on extracting super-profits from its labor force, as well as others around the world, Trump and Biden follow the same policies in imposing tariffs on Chinese imports. In decades past these same imports made the top one percent of the US elite richer than ever! This is the same owning and controlling elite that has presided over the increasing impoverishment of the US working class. The rich got richer as a crisis-ridden US capitalism then, and ever more so today, slashed basic social services, imposed zero benefit gig economy part time jobs on millions, substituted machines for workers, enforced speed-up on job sites and limited or eliminated pensions. Meanwhile, monopoly corporations raised prices with abandon.
All this takes place in the context of a world capitalism in rapid decline, with failing corporations with the lowest or zero profit rates driven from the marketplace, dissolved or merged into giant global conglomerates, ever forced to impose greater and greater austerity measures against working people in order to compete in the ever-intensifying monopoly driven globalized “dog-eat-dog” capitalist world.
Rising fascist rhetoric in preparation for the future
Offshoring production (de-industrialization), union-busting, racist scapegoating, massive deportations, endless wars and environmental destruction are central to world capitalism’s “solutions.” Trump’s fascist-like rhetoric, not to mention his failed January 6 coup effort to retain the presidency, are matched by demagogues across the planet, with some, still a tiny minority, threatening and/or aiming to organize violent thugs to attack immigrants or even trade union meetings in France and elsewhere.
Rolling back basic historic democratic gains, as with right to abortion, with the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Roe vs. Wade decision of a half-century ago, is today’s norm. Trump’s Supreme Court notwithstanding, the Democrats, when they controlled both houses of Congress, repeatedly failed to include abortion – the right of women to control their own bodies – into federal law.
No “lesser evils” in capitalist elections
There is no such thing as “lesser evilism” in capitalist politics. “Genocide Joe” is no more or no less a vicious monster than Donald Trump, whose Supreme Court majority appointees today proceed to openly approve Trump’s January 6 coup aimed at nullifying the 2020 election result. In the name of a now Supreme Court-sanctioned “presidential immunity” – the king can do no wrong, Trump’s juridical stooges openly codified what has always been US capitalist policy, but never quite so blatant.
In today’s imperialist world US-led coups, secret, and no-so-secret, “regime change” interventions, assassinations and overt wars are the rule, all sanctioned by the US ruling class’s “interpretation” of “international law,” and, when necessary, by resort to spurious incantations claiming the necessity of defending the “national security interests” of the country, that is, of US imperialism.
Trump’s fascist-like rhetoric is matched by Biden’s daily deeds. As world capitalism’s crises deepen the ruling rich, in anticipation of future mass united currents of working class opposition, increasingly understand that their minority rule can only be maintained by repression, that is, by force and violence of the fascist type. Hitler’s fascism arose at a time when Germany’s “democratic” capitalist leaders, crippled by the onerous reparation and territorial losses imposed on them by its WWI French, British and US conquerors via the Versailles Treaty, and in the face of massive Social Democratic and Communist parties that represented the majority of German workers, called on Hitler’s Nazis Party – a minority in the German elections – to protect their interests. The time had come, they calculated, to substitute mass repression for parliamentary and electoral formalities. Indeed, it was only after Hitler had outlawed and physically decimated Germany’s mass working class parties and their leaders that he turned to the annihilation of the Jewish people.
Today’s would-be US fascists, Trump included, and their counterparts in Europe and Latin America, have only dabbled with physical repression. Their rightest forces are still limited to relatively small-scale attacks against immigrants, trade union meetings and political gatherings, none sanctioned by the state power itself. But make no mistake, no ruling class in history has ever ceded power voluntarily to an organized mass majority working class aimed at militantly defending itself against capitalist’s systematic attacks on its well-being.
The way forward for working people
The process of defending working people today against these inevitable attacks is before us. It begins with the independent united front type political organization of working people in their own parties and mass organizations. It includes the organization of massive united protests against capitalist exploitation, oppression and war at home and abroad. Today’s US and worldwide solidarity with the Palestinian people is a powerful example. It deeply frightens US rulers, who fear that it negates their racist scapegoating of immigrants, Blacks, Latinex people, LGBTQI+ people and all others who capitalism aims to blame for its own inherent failures.
Today’s fightback must also include the independent organization of working people in the political-electoral arena, in the streets and at the point of production. A mass qualitatively expanded, democratically organized fighting trade union-based Labor Party, allied with all the oppressed and exploited, will be a first critical step in this direction. A pre-requisite to this rounded working class-based mobilization to defend the rights of the oppressed and all working people, is the organization of a mass revolutionary socialist party deeply embedded in every working class struggle.