Bully Biden Bombs Syria, Slashes COVID-19 Payments and Drops $15 Minimum
Wage
https://socialistaction.org/2021/03/06/bully-biden-bombs-syria-slashes-covid-19-payments-and-drops-15-minimum-wage/
March 6, 2021
By Jeff Mackler
President Joseph Biden’s fealty to U.S. imperialism and its ruling class
domestic agenda was demonstrated soon after his Jan. 20 White House
arrival. Five days later he sent additional troops to northeastern Syria
to fortify U.S. control of that U.S. beleaguered nation’s oil rich and
most fertile agricultural region. On Feb. 25 Biden directed U.S. drones
to drop multiple 500-pound bombs on Syria, targeting the Iranian Kataib
Hezbollah militia forces that were there to help defend that beleaguered
nation from U.S.-backed attacks and to thwart still-existing ISIS forces
intent on entering neighboring Iraq. The Iranian militia forces were
there at the invitation of the Syrian government. Indeed, the
combination of Iranian, Lebanese Hezbollah militias and Russian forces
that answered Syria’s call for help was decisive in defeating the
U.S./NATO/Gulf State monarchy’s regime change “coalition” war, that
including at various times ISIS forces. The latter were organized,
financed, armed and directed by the U.S. military. By 2015-16 these
so-called rebels, overwhelmingly from outside Syria, combined to occupy
some two-thirds of the country. Thy were poised to take the capital
city of Damascus itself. Had Syria, a poor and oppressed nation about to
become yet another conquered U.S. neo-colonial failed and plundered
state, not exercised its right to self-determination and sought aid
against the U.S. imperial beast, its fate would have been inevitably
sealed. Indeed, virtually every major U.S. corporate media outlet all
but predicted the date of its conquest and planned dismemberment. Its
President Bashar al-Assad, was said be preparing to flee.
This U.S.-led cabal had convened in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in December
2015 with 116 participants – none representing the Syrian government –
to negotiate among themselves Syria’s anticipated division and its
future “leaders.” President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry
effectively presided over this “Syrian Opposition Conference.” Said
Kerry, “We welcome the positive outcome of the gathering of the Syrian
opposition in Riyadh today including reaching a consensus on principles
for a pluralistic and democratic [division of] Syria… We appreciate that
this extremely diverse group of Syrians put aside differences in the
interest of building a new Syria.”
Warmaker Biden
The bully imperialist Biden defended the recent U.S. bombing of Iranian
forces in Syria claiming without proof that it was in retaliation for
Iranian forces based in Iraq firing missiles at U.S. military bases
including at an airport at Erbil. Iran has denied that its forces were
responsible for the attack. Indeed, the New York Times a day later, Feb.
26, reported that “a previously unknown group calling itself Guardians
of Blood claimed responsibility.” The corporate media characterized
Biden’s bombing order, that murdered 22 Iranians in Syria, as the new
president’s first overseas military venture. They were dead wrong.
U.S imperialism: the colonial occupier Iraq
Biden’s military has been consistent assassins in Iraq, Somalia and
Afghanistan before and after he assumed the presidency. How could it be
otherwise? The U.S. maintains 1,100 military bases in some 100 nations.
This world’s most powerful war behemoth exists solely to advance the
interests of the tiny ruling class few. For these would-be masters of
the universe death and destruction serve as their ultimate weapon.
Biden, of course, neglected to mention that the U.S. today operates to a
significant extent as Iraq’s neo-colonial master. Following two
devastating U.S. wars against this relatively defenseless nation – 1990
and 2003 – and associated sanctions and periodic bombings that combined
to take the lives of 1.5 million Iraqis, few doubt that Iraq’s periodic
U.S. overseen elections notwithstanding, the U.S. continues to call the
shots. The U.S. military conquest of 2003 was immediately followed by
the appointment of American diplomat Paul Bremer to govern the defeated
nation via a Coalition Provisional Authority. Iraq’s oil resources were
shortly after ceded to U.S. corporations. Permanent U.S. military bases
were established across the country. Students of Iraqi history may
recall that the war itself was justified with the lie that Iraq
possessed “weapons of mass destruction” that its President Saddam
Hussein was about to launch against other nations. One after another
U.S. military official and the then Secretary of State Collin Powell
publically presented “evidence” to the United Nations of such “weapons
of mass destruction.” None existed. None were ever found. Powell himself
testified that he was deceived with false information. Nevertheless Iraq
was destroyed.
That the current Iraqi government, pressed by massive and repeated
anti-U.S. demonstrations protesting last year’s Trump-ordered drone
assassination of Iranian Quds force leader Qassim Suleimani near the
Baghdad Airport, had demanded the withdrawal of U.S. forces also went
unmentioned by Biden. Neither did the fact that the Iranian forces in
Iraq were there at the behest of the Iraqi government, where they
operate as an official part of the Iraqi Army engaging in joint efforts
to combat ISIS attacks.
Imperialist arrogance knows no limits.
It was later reported that Biden’s real objective was to force the
Iranians to engage in negotiations that would allow the U.S. to return
to the previously negotiated and Trump abandoned “Iran Nuclear Deal,”
the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The Iranians have
insisted that any U.S. return was contingent on an end to the deadly
U.S. sanctions that have inflicted untold misery on the Iranian people.
Biden’s steadily mounting war moves included his cancellation of U.S.
plans, negotiated by the Trump Administration, to withdraw U.S. troops
from Afghanistan, where the U.S. war machine continues its 20 years of
slaughter and occupation.
Biden’s U.S. corporate agenda
On the home front Biden quickly signed some 42 Executive Orders,
purportedly to revoke Donald Trump’s most heinous decrees. The
implementation of these orders, however, is far from immediate, being
subject to “implementation and interpretation” by yet-to-be-established
bureaucratic government oversight bodies.
Meanwhile Biden’s touted $1.9 trillion new COVID-19 relief package has
been stalled in the U.S. Senate as his own Democratic Party “moderates”
strip it of Biden’s election-time promises, especially his proposal to
increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. That promise has
vanished. Biden’s promise of a one-time grant of $2,000 per person as a
COVID-19 stimulus relief payment has been reduced to $1,400 with new
provisions included to limit eligibility for this reduced payment to 19
million fewer people than Trump’s previously-signed legislation.
Similarly, Biden’s promised $2 trillion in future legislation to upgrade
the nation’s failing infrastructure to provide new jobs has been shelved
as both capitalist parties reject funding any such project by raising
taxes on the rich. Indeed, both Republicans and Democrats joined to pass
Trump’s unprecedented tax cuts for the corporate elite that slashed
corporate tax levels and allowed U.S. multi-nationals to offshore
profits to avoid taxation.
Capitalism’s profit or perish credo
The sum total of all the policies of a crisis ridden world capitalist
system amount to making working people pay – to the constant
immiseration of the masses, to their repeated subjection to
recession/depression cycles that permeate capitalism’s history and throw
ever-increasing numbers into the ranks of the unemployed and
underemployed. Whether it be overt union busting, obliteration of
pensions and health care benefits, workplace speed up, offshoring plants
to low wage nations, imperialist conquests to secure vital resources,
cutbacks in social services, “elimination of welfare as we know it,” the
bi-partisan objective is the same – to preference the corporate elite at
the expense of the vast majority, a preference driven not by any moral
failings of the super rich, but by the necessities imposed by the very
operation of the system itself. Whether capitalists are well-intentioned
or evil, Democrat or Republican, they must deploy one or another or all
of the above measures aimed at workers to keep their businesses afloat
in the face of the incessant competition that drives them to profit or
perish.
Joseph Biden is Donald Trump, but better attuned to posing himself as a
civilized politician acting in the interests of the vast majority.
Beneath this thin veneer of compassion, however, lies another
experienced racist warmongering puppet of the U.S. ruling elite, the
very image he previously projected in the course of his three-plus
decades of service to the governments of the exploiting few.
The independent organization of working people to challenge capitalist
rule in all its manifestations today stands at the center of the program
of all revolutionary socialist organizations today.
(Jeff Mackler is a staff writer for Socialist Action newspaper. He can
be reached at socialistaction@xxxxxxx socialistaction.org)
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