Billionaire-backed Biden and Trump Debate
https://socialistaction.org/2020/10/06/billionaire-backed-biden-and-trump-debate/
October 6, 2020
By JEFF MACKLER
Jeff Mackler is Socialist Action’s 2020 candidate for the U.S. presidency
Joseph Biden’s Democrats have the edge on Donald Trump’s Republicans
with regard to billionaire backing, with Biden leading, according to
Forbes magazine, by 131-93. This simple fact should inform serious
social justice activists or even newcomers to capitalist electoral
politics that something is amiss with the system itself. Leaving aside
the millions routinely disenfranchised by racist voter suppression, that
working people are allowed every four years to cast their vote for one
of the twin parties of racist warmongering capitalism tells us that the
ruling rich have little to fear. Indeed, if our future depends on a
Biden or a Trump to save humanity from the multiple catastrophic crises
that their system has created, we are in deep trouble. On the other
hand, if the future depends on the forthright entrance of the masses
– center stage – we have a world to win. That’s the only real concern
of the ruling class.
The ugly Sept. 29 Biden-Trump slugfest shocked even the most cynical
observers. But Trump’s disgusting and ceaseless interruptions and his
torrent of lies and personal insults notwithstanding, neither he nor
Biden proved capable of seriously addressing any of the critical issues
facing working people today. Capitalism’s rush to global warming-induced
oblivion, its endless imperialist wars that slaughter millions and
reduce nations to starvation and poverty, its bi-partisan incapacity to
deal with the COVID-19 pandemic that has taken the lives of 210,000 in
the U.S. alone, went unmentioned. Its economic meltdown that has reduced
countless millions to economic destitution, massive unemployment, loss
of health care and to a daily life subjected to ingrained racist
brutality and sexist and LGBTQI+ discrimination, were essentially denied
or addressed with blame-placing retorts or vacuous homilies.
One or two line pre-planned jibes saying nothing and aimed at scoring
cheap debater’s points for the moment sufficed for both. Shakespeare
said it well four centuries ago, “It was a tale told by idiots, full of
sound and fury, signifying nothing!” Nothing, that is, but hate, bluster
and platitudes uttered by strutting and poorly coached accidental bit
players set on a world stage for ninety minutes and pretending relevancy
at a time when the world faces unprecedented crises, solutions to which
their bloody interests are incapable of even the dimmest contemplation.
Trump red-baited Biden for Bernie’s “socialism,” with Biden running for
the hills proclaiming “I beat Bernie.” Referring to his party’s
platform, devoid of any mention of Sanders rhetoric, Biden cried out, “I
am the Democratic Party.” Trump grinned with delight and said, “You just
lost the left.”
To expect anything of substance from these crude representatives of the
billionaire elite is to live in a dream world of illusion based on a
“reality” created by their corporate media machines, wherein we are
daily advised via multi-million dollar TV bursts to choose between the
good billionaires and the bad billionaires, between “lesser” evils and
the “greater” evils, between overt racists and covert racists, between
the abject supporters and promoters of the military-industrial and
prison-industrial complexes and the abject supporters and promoters of
the military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes.
By prior agreement both “debaters” agreed to leave out the life-or-death
issues of global warming, military spending, U.S. imperialism’s
ever-expanding wars of intervention and domination, and massive
bi-partisan tax cuts for the rich, accompanied by trillion dollar
corporate bailouts. Why discuss these when there is total agreement?
Fox News moderator Chris Wallace couldn’t resist throwing in a question
to Biden as to why he had not called on Portland’s mayor and Oregon’s
governor to bring in federal troops to crush “violent protestors.”
Neither candidate thought to respond that the base sources of violence
and repression in capitalist society are the racist and
institutionalized powers of the police, ICE, Homeland Security, the FBI
and associated groups whose function is to defend and maintain the
repressive capitalist status quo.
Biden, who referred to police violence as the product of “a few bad
apples,” ignored his own role in overseeing legislation that filled the
nation’s increasingly privatized, for-profit prisons to unprecedented
heights with millions of poor victims of social injustice jailed by the
racist “criminal justice system” and assigned to work at slave wages for
Fortune 500 corporations. Biden’s boss, Barack Obama, “The Great
Deporter,” similarly filled his U.S. detention centers to the brim while
expelling a record-setting three million immigrants.
Trump merely followed in Biden’s footsteps and racist past, while
presenting himself as “the best president for Black people since Abraham
Lincoln”! Wallace queried these hate-filled buffoon candidates of the
ruling rich as to whether they saw the coming “economic upswing” as
taking the graphic form of a “V” or a “K”-shaped recovery, that is, a
quick recovery or a divergent economy in which the rich benefit while
the suffering of workers increases.
Neither candidate proved capable of uttering a word about the 42 million
who have lost their jobs, many permanently, or the rigged unemployment
statistics that put the real number of eligible workers without jobs at
37 percent. Neither could note that a combination of the Federal Reserve
and the U.S. Treasury effectively pumped into the coffers of the
corporate elite some $6 trillion, an amount roughly equal to the total
loss in the nation’s GDP.
Overt and covert bigots
The overt bigot Trump urged his Proud Boy racist followers to “Stand
back and stand by,” until he felt the need to call in federal troops to
crush the expected and unprecedented mass mobilizations that will
inevitably follow should he declare himself president on Election Day
after refusing to count tens of millions of mail-in and absentee
ballots. Biden, a historic defender of the anti-democratic and racist
Electoral College system, was clever enough to designate the Proud Boys
as racist, but made no mention of how he would respond should Trump
declare his personal dictatorship on November 3, presumably to be backed
by a future vote of his Supreme Court. The sheer notion that nine ruling
class-appointed figures can or should decide the fate of 340 million
working people has been increasingly called into question.
No doubt growing elements of the billionaire elite, accustomed to
financing one or another or both of capitalism’s corporate parties, are
today considering taking their distance from Trump’s increasingly
inflammatory declarations and actions. Rarely a week passes when one or
another Republican fund-raising Political Action Committee announces
support for Biden’s campaign.
A fleet of generals, including Trump’s own Chair of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, General Mark Milley as well as his Defense Secretary, Mark Esper
have taken their distance from Trump’s threat to call in federal troops
to crush anti-racist and Black Lives Matter protestors should they
challenge any decision wherein he rejects a peaceful transition after
losing the election.
Trump’s Labor Day weekend statement similarly enraged Pentagon tops who
he charged with advocating war “so that all of those wonderful companies
that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else [would]
stay happy.” Posing himself as a “peace candidate,” indeed one who
should win the Nobel Peace Prize, the “moron” Trump – the designation
first coined by his former, now resigned Secretary of State and
ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson – calculated that he might win a few more
votes from the unwary, while assuming that his friends at the war
industries would understand that his remarks were nothing more than
campaign rhetoric.
Trump’s Defense Secretary Esper hails from the Raytheon Corporation, a
central Pentagon contractor. Esper’s acting Defense Secretary
predecessor hails from the Boeing Corporation while Trump’s Secretary of
the Army came from Lockheed Martin. Trump famously took out a full-page
ad in the New York Times in the run-up to the 2016 elections listing a
host of retired generals as his supporters and bragging that he had more
support in the military than his rival Hillary Clinton.
Nearly four years later, many of these generals have disappeared from
Trump’s inner circles by virtue of Trump’s boot or by their own public
denunciation. Either way, in the “civilized” and democratic
constitutionally-based society that all generals pretend to uphold, it’s
not good politics to threaten working people with concerted military
force and violence, “at least for now,” they usually add. “At least for
now!”
The moron Trump, posturing as virtually immune from COVID-19, not to
mention minimizing its deadly impact on millions, couldn’t resist
denigrating Biden during the debate for regularly wearing a mask. The
next day, a maskless Trump campaigned in several cities. Earlier in the
week – and prior to Tuesday’s debate – TV cameras focused on Trump’s
crowded White House Rose Garden ceremony, where he announced his Supreme
Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. Pictures of Trump’s widely
photographed outdoor ceremony, attended by 200 obsequious flatterers,
revealed that the vast majority were not wearing masks or following
social distancing guidelines. Invitees were seated in closely packed
rows of chairs. The event is now thought to be a super-spreader, where
at least eight attendees were infected.
Meanwhile, assuming that Trump is available, the next scheduled debate
on Oct.15 is expected to include provisions to thwart interruptions,
including cutting off the microphones of rule violators. Regardless,
rounds two and three of the Trump-Biden debates can only be expected to
be characterized by more of the same mindless bluster and bluff as
neither candidate of the ruling rich holds any solutions to the daily
horrors their decaying and rapacious system inflicts on working people.
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Robert G. Ingersoll
“Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm
of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat
of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Works Of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. Iii