Biden’s cabinet picks: Ruling class politics or socialist revolution?
https://socialistaction.org/2020/12/14/bidens-cabinet-picks-ruling-class-politics-or-socialist-revolution/
December 14, 2020
By JEFF MACKLER
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’s
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.
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.
Capitalism’s horses of the apocalypse
Capitalism’s 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’s
have a look at what the “lesser evil” Democrats have in store for
working people.
Biden’s “diversity” cabinet
Biden promised his Democratic Party supporters gender and racial parity
in his cabinet appointments. Indeed, he boasted last week, “I’m not
going to tell you now exactly what I’m doing in any department, but I
promise you, it’ll be the single most diverse cabinet, based on race,
color and gender that’s ever existed in the United States of America.”
Biden, the racist bigot of yesteryear and friend of Strom Thurmond, went
further a day earlier, with CNN reporting that he “plans to meet with
the board of the NAACP to make it clear he’s listening to their myriad
concerns as he plays a complex game of chess.” “Chess,” in the view of
the ruling rich at the moment, is their version of “identity politics”
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.
Four-star General Lloyd J. Austin III, recently retired from the Army in
2016, is president-elect Joseph Biden’s choice for Secretary of Defense,
vetted by Biden’s 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.
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’s
third-largest defense contractor.
A Black man, Austin apparently beat out Michèle Flournoy, who was
originally slated to head the Pentagon and would have been the first
woman to do so.
Democratic Party’s wars led by Clinton and Obama
Michèle 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 – the largest number and percentage in U.S. history.
In a 2017 Washington Post op-ed calling for increased military spending,
Flournoy argued that President Trump was “right to raise the need for
more defense dollars.” She posited that Obama didn’t 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 “weapons of mass destruction” that did
not exist (Iraq), and on falsified “humanitarian” grounds (Libya).
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.
Then there’s Anthony Blinken, Biden’s 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.
Bailing out the corporate elite
Janet Yellen, former Federal Reserve chair under Obama, is today Biden’s
pick for Treasury Secretary. She is praised for her advocacy of
“extraordinary fiscal support” 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
“quantitative easing” 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 “infrastructure” investments were non-existent.
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 “wealth gap” in the
U.S. Bless her soul! Yellen noted that the bottom half of the population
receives just one percent of the nation’s 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’s share reached historic proportions!
Climate catastrophe and oil wars
The best that liberal pundits could utter with regard to Biden’s
appointment of former Secretary of State John Kerry as special envoy for
climate was that “at least he recognizes the science.” Kerry, a carbon
tax and cap-and-trade advocate, replete with corporate loopholes galore
to be sure, championed Obama’s drive to advance off-shore drilling and
to become the world’s 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.
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 “coalition” 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.
Drone wars and torture
Avril Haines, a former Obama deputy CIA chief, is another Biden-proposed
cabinet appointee. She’s slated to be Biden’s Director of National
Intelligence. Haines was among Obama’s top drone program experts,
through which murder, execution-style, was delivered from the heavens
with impunity, including against U.S. citizens, not to mention at an
occasional Yemeni wedding turned into a funeral. The Daily Beast
reported in July that Haines was involved in the sham “accountability”
process that shielded CIA officials from punishment for their
involvement with torture. CIA director Gina Haspel’s nomination was
supported by Haines despite Haspel’s direct supervision of U.S. Middle
East torture programs.
Sanders opts for Democratic Party payback
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, the Democrats’ leading “progressive,” who
pledged absolute loyalty to Biden’s campaign, was reduced to pleading
for the post of Secretary of Labor during a late-November interview with
CNN. Sanders pathetically pledged, should he be appointed, that he would
work for legislation to increase the percentage of union membership, as
if the corporate rich who run the country, having reduced union
membership to a 100-year low, would consider such a proposition for a
split-second. The notion that real union power emanates from the
independent and united mobilizations of the broad working class in
alliance with all the struggles of the oppressed and exploited, is alien
to Sanders, whose vision of progress resides exclusively in transforming
rapacious capitalism from within.
And Elizabeth Warren? She too is looking for a cabinet appointment,
perhaps based on her service to Biden in remaining in the Democratic
Party primary contest through the Super Tuesday spectacle that saw the
entire party apparatus unite to trash Sanders’s drive for the
nomination. Glenn Greenwald reports that Warren’s final primary campaign
received some $50 million in dark money to keep her in the running,
despite her repeated primary failures, including in her own state of
Massachusetts.
AOC and The Squad counsel Biden caution
As Sanders and Warren maneuver for some Biden payback recognition, other
“progressives” like CNN White House reporter Jeff Zeleny offered up a
thumbnail sketch of the “liberal” capitalist mindset. Zeleny noted that
that “Congressional super star Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
understands why the Biden team has been cautious in some of their picks
so far – because GOP control of the Senate makes the confirmation
process more difficult – but she urged the Biden team to adopt a more
aggressive strategy if Democrats sweep the Georgia Senate runoff.”
To date, a record $300 million has been pumped into Georgia’s two Senate
runoff races, with the Democrats again outspending the Republicans. But
the notion that a Democratic Party majority in the U.S. Senate will open
the door to any significant change is fundamentally flawed. The
Democrats had a majority in both houses of congress under Obama with
zero positive results for working people. When it comes to serious
politics the so-called progressive congressional Democrats are joined at
the hip with their blue dog, “centrist,” more-overtly reactionary
counterparts. Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez’s “Squad” supported every Democrat,
blue dogs included, in the 2018 mid-term elections and again in 2020!
Sanders bites the bullet
“Party loyalty” found the Democrats united, not only among themselves,
but with the Republicans, in passing last year’s tax bill that gifted
$1.5 trillion to the ruling rich. The details, hundreds, if not
thousands of pages, were worked out behind the scenes by a coterie of
ruling class specialists skilled in advancing their masters’ interests.
The same with the $6 trillion CARES Act and the new NAFTA accord. The
same with the $4.79 trillion 2020 U.S. budget and, in fact, with regard
to every significant piece of legislation that touches on ruling class
interests.
Biden’s appointment of Neera Tanden as Director of the Office of
Management and Budget raised some “progressive” eyebrows. A Hillary
Clinton staffer in 2016 and in Biden’s 2020 primary campaign run,
Tanden’s focus was on branding Sanders and his supporters as “crazy
leftists.” She led the pack is making clear that Sanders’s tepid “Green
New Deal” and “democratic socialism” had no takers among the party’s elite.
Biden himself was decisive on this matter when he faced Trump in their
one-on-one debate. He responded to Trump’s consciously planned
provocative red-baiting charge that the Democrats were socialists by
proclaiming, “I beat Bernie. I am the Democratic Party.” A grinning
Trump, satisfied that he had made his point, responded, almost under his
breath, “You just lost the left.” Sanders, in turn, made sure that his
“left” would stay the Biden course, including, I estimate, when the day
comes, approving Tanden as OMB head.
As Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Tanden’s task is the
construction for Biden and the ruling rich of an expected $5 trillion
2021 U.S. budget proposal. This annual multi-thousand-page tome, replete
with innumerable charts, graphs, references to myriad previous
allocations, includes incorporated budget proposals from all the
departments in the executive branch of the government (Defense,
Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services,
Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor,
State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs).
The budget constitutes the ruling class’s central economic, social and
political objectives and priorities. It is and has always been the
ruling class bible – the sacred scroll that guarantees their absolute
ownership, control and distribution of the nation’s wealth. None of the
100 Senators and 435 members of the House of Representatives is likely
to have read this tome, drafted by literally hundreds of bureaucrats
overseeing the nation’s 15 executive departments, all of whom are
beholden to the final approval of the select few chosen by the ruling
elite. (See Larry Shoup’s book Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on
Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2019
and Peter Phillips’s Giants: The Global Power Elite.)
Media trivia disguises capitalist reality
Today’s sound and fury over whether the Democrats will win in Georgia
and thus capture a majority in the U.S. Senate (51-50, including the
vice president’s tie-breaking vote), or whether Trump’s Senate
Republicans will veto Biden’s cabinet nominees, is nothing less than the
idle chatter generated by corporate media pundits assigned to sanctify
and legitimize the daily machinations of ruling class politics. Will
Biden keep his promise to appoint “the most diverse cabinet in U.S.
history?” Will Bernie vote to approve his “arch enemy” Tanden as OMB
director? Will the nation’s government be paralyzed due to the split
congress? Will Trump return victorious in 2024?
Those who dabble in such trivia, not to mention those who promote the
Democrats as the necessary “lesser evils,” exist to justify and support
capitalist minority rule. Those who are among today’s ever-questioning
and engaged social and economic justice fighters, including the growing
majority of 18-34 year-old youth – 58 percent – who state in poll after
poll that socialism, not capitalism, is their preference, are humanity’s
future. These are the youth, Black, white and Brown who mobilized in the
tens of millions last summer in the face of the deadly COVID-19
pandemic, to defend Black lives in the face of systemic racism police
terror, who are the movement’s future, the socialist future.
In time, they will bypass the Bernie Sanders Democratic Party
sheepherders and those too-many on the left that have abandoned
challenging the capitalist beast. They will rebuild and transform
today’s moribund trade unions, unite all social justice struggles and
join in the construction of a disciplined, democratic mass revolutionary
socialist party to end capitalist rule. Join us! Join Socialist Action!
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Charles Bukowski “For those who believe in God, most of the big
questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the
God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to
new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a
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to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds
and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” ―
Charles Bukowski