Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States amidst an armed fortress in the nation’s capital on January 6, 2021. Twenty-five thousand National Guard troops were deployed to ensure a peaceful transition of power for the American plutocracy.
The scene was reminiscent of the nomination of Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where the candidate was shielded from anti-war demonstrators by thousands of riotous police and armed National Guard troops. The year was 1968.
Such moments reveal the essence of the American police state.
In his inaugural address, Biden pledged to be a president who represented all Americans as he pleaded for “unity” in a society more polarized than it was during the height of the Vietnam war.
Using tired and vapid rhetoric to intone the “triumph of democracy,” Biden seemed unaware that genuine democracy reflects the will of the people. In America the peoples’ interests have been systematically repudiated by neoliberal Democrats and Republicans alike.
Biden was the victor in a hotly disputed race, resulting in violent protests, fomented by Trump, that marred the certification of the presidential election on the very steps of the Capitol where he took the oath of office.
In a bona fide democracy, elections would be free, fair and transparent. In the United States, billions are spent on elections, third-party and insurgent candidates such as Ralph Nader, Jill Stein, and Bernie Sanders are routinely thwarted by the political establishment and the corporate media, the use of computer software to record electronic ballots in voting machines owned by private companies such asDominion or Diebold opens the door to charges of hacking and fraud, and the antiquated electoral college can negate the popular vote.
Prior to the 2020 vote, credible evidence exists to prove that Presidential elections were stolen in 1824, 1876, 1888, 1960, 2000, and 2004.
Just a short time before the restrained pomp and circumstance of the inauguration, angry pro-Trump rioters took over the Capitol building, sending its congressional inhabitants and their aids scurrying for cover like so many frightened vermin.
The congressional representatives of corporate America seem not to understand the hatred they provoke by sending a $600.00 covid ‘relief’ check to millions of citizens who are facing eviction, hunger and joblessness amidst the pandemic lockdown while funneling billions of dollars to their rich benefactors.
Nor do they understand the seething anger of a dispossessed white working class that was thrown overboard in a globalized and financialized economy by Wall Street and the Washington political establishment, creating a fertile ground for Trump to propagate his fake right-wing populist rhetoric and xenophobic malevolence.
The depth of economic depression in the United States will drive Biden and the Democrats to posture as ‘tribunes of the people’ by increasing relief in the next covid-19 bailout package after holding back on the size of the second round of stimulus aid to defeat Trump. But they will not provide the American people with genuine relief by providing a program of ‘Medicare for All’ and ‘Universal Basic Income’ for the duration of the pandemic lockdown and beyond.
For Democrats and Republicans alike, the political game is all about power, not people. The Republicans steal everything in sight for the rich while the Democrats throw a few more scraps to the people to mollify their discontent.
The irony that his party is the first to compel an impeachment trial of a president after he has left office is lost on Biden. Such actions do not ensure unity, they guarantee unbreachable divisiveness. The second impeachment trial of Trump will not end in conviction. It will further polarize the American electorate and allow the Democrats and Republicans to continue the shell game of legislative politics in a power sharing arrangement that guarantees the people get nothing while plutocracy gets everything.
The second impeachment of Donald Trump by the Democrats represents not only an act of political retribution for his defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, but an attempt to neutralize their arch enemy by circumventing any possibility he may run for re-election to the nation’s highest office in 2024.
By impeaching Trump a second time, Democrats are further enraging his legions of followers who believe the election was stolen. The venomous Democrats led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Senator from Wall Street and Israel, Chuck Schumer, are throwing kerosene on a raging political fire. The result will further polarize and already fractured social and political landscape in a country whose people are armed to the teeth.
It should be remembered that the result of the FBI assaults on the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992 and the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas in 1993 was the domestic terrorist attack in Oklahoma Cityin 1995.
And the direct result of bombing a Federal office building in Oklahoma City was Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, a stark precursor to Bush’s USA Patriot Act of 2001. Using the pretext of fighting terrorism, these two notorious pieces of legislation effectively neutralized key elements of the Bill of Rights, consigning the 1st,4th, 5th, 6th and 8th amendments of the U.S. constitution to dead letters.
Trump supporters will now be collectively identified as ‘domestic terrorists’, ‘white supremacists’, and ‘neo-Nazis’ to justify intensifieddomestic repression in the ‘war on terror’. Next in line to be targeted are the ‘extremists’ on the left, such as Antifa, supporters of Black Lives Matter, and prominent critics of empire. As the greatest threat to the American plutocracy comes from the redistributive class politics of the left, not the right, it will be the left that bears the ultimate burden of political repression.
Despite lofty rhetoric, the Democrats care very little for democracy and the rule of law. If they respected democracy, they would not have fomented coup d’états in Honduras in 2009 or Ukraine in 2014. They would not have destroyed Libya in 2011 or Syria in 2014. They would not have invented Russiagate and Ukrainegate to justify the first unsuccessful impeachment of Trump in 2018.
Nor would they continue to wage economic warfare in Venezuela to engineer regime change in a beleaguered country where 40,000 lives have already been lost because of U.S. imposed asset seizure, sanction and embargo.
In his inaugural speech, Biden promised to re-establish international alliances so the United States could be a “force for good” in the world. The U. S. has not been a ‘force for good’ in the world since it won the first anti-colonial revolution against the British in 1783. The abolition of slavery completed that revolution with the conclusion of the civil war in 1865.
These revolutions were won at the expense of indigenous peoples who were exterminated between 1622 and the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and Mexican peoples who were internally colonized in the American southwest at the conclusion of the Mexican-American war in 1848. With its victory in the Spanish American war of 1898, the U.S. became a global imperialist power and has not looked back since.
U.S. global destabilization of democratically elected governments in the 21st century perpetrated by Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump include coups in Venezuela in 2002, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, Haiti in 2004, Occupied Palestine in 2007, Honduras in 2009, Egypt in 2013, Ukraine in 2014, and Venezuela in 2019.
All the foregoing U.S. sponsored coup d’états were successful except for American failure to overthrow Hamas in Gaza and the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.
Now the U.S. has turned its sights on Russia and is using the Navalny affair as a pretext to execute a color revolution in the Kremlin. Biden and his lackeys should beware of provoking the Russian bear. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have moved the doomsday clock to 100 seconds before midnight, no small part because of belligerent and confrontational U.S. policies toward Russia that have provoked a new arms race involving the development and deployment of hypersonic weapons.
Presidential commitment to democracy and the rule of law is a fiction easily dismissed by a cursory reading of U.S. imperialism’s history. Amidst the fractious polarization of American politics, one reality remains constant, continuity of the imperial presidency driven by the rapacious greed of a corporate plutocracy the chief executives serve.
Donald Monaco is a political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War. He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective. His recent book is titled, The Politics ofTerrorism, and is available at amazon.com
