by Eric Zuesse for The Saker Blog
On 2 March 2020, Forbes headlined “BILLIONAIRE BACKERS” and listed the number of them who had financed each of the Democratic Presidential campaigns:
- Biden 66
- Buttigieg 61
- Klobucar 33
- Steyer 13
- Warren 6
- Gabbard 3
- Bloomberg 1
- Sanders 0
Joe Biden’s entire career in public life has been devoted to his top donors. He once even justified it by saying, “You go out and bundle $250,000 for me, all legal, and then you call me after I am elected, and say ‘I would like to come and talk about something.’ You didn’t buy me, but it’s human nature, you helped me. I’m going to say, ‘Sure, come on in’,” which means that if you have “helped” him, then he represents you in a way that he doesn’t represent the voters who merely voted for him on the basis of the ads for him that those billionaires had financed. (And if you had voted against him, then would such a person represent you at all?) As a major donor, you can visit with him in private, whenever you want, instead of never be able to visit with him, at all. This is what’s called “crony capitalism,” and he built his career on it, and he thinks that this is okay.
On May 3rd, the Miami Herald bannered “Biden, Warren: There’s no oversight of coronavirus relief — because that’s what Trump wants”, and Biden signed onto an Elizabeth Warren Op-Ed there that evaded the chief corruption in the bailout legislation which was unanimously passed in Congress and was signed by Trump. Almost all of the corruption in that enormously lobbied bill is in the bailouts for corporations; virtually none of it is in the bailouts for workers or for state and local governments; and, yet, neither Biden nor Warren were presenting, in this Op-Ed, the case against bailing out ANY corporations. And the reason is obvious: Joe Biden had needed to cheat in order to win the Democratic nomination, and he couldn’t have succeeded to get the money from 66 billionaires and to win the nomination if he hadn’t done this — he needed that money, in order to be able to pull it off and fool enough voters. And, those billionaires’ wealth is mainly in investments, corporate stocks and bonds, which are receiving the biggest portion of those bailouts. In other words: most of the leveraged-up $6 trillion total that’s in just the first piece of legislation comes from the “$454 Billion Slush Fund for Wall Street Bailouts”. That’s actually the biggest portion of the bailouts for billionaires.
What Biden and Warren are proposing, instead, is that there should have been better monitoring of how that money will be spent or ‘invested’. The actual issue is that all bailouts that go to investors instead of to the public — workers and consumers — are wrong: a top-down, trickle-down, give-away to the richest, so as to guarantee their wealth until the crisis has passed. Workers and consumers will absorb almost all of the losses. Whereas 70% of the wealth of the richest 0.1% is investments, and 55% of the top 1% also is, only around 7% of the bottom 99% is. The wealth of the bottom 99% is overwhelmingly labor-based — and labor gets punished by the controlling investors. And, so, whereas the wealth of the richest 1% is receiving significant protection by this Government in that bailout, the wealth of the rest of the population isn’t. Workers and consumers are largely on their own. The risks are transferred away from the super-rich, onto the public. The super-rich had hired enormous armies of lobbyists in order, basically, to write this legislation.
Biden isn’t necessarily worse than Trump, but the deception of the public is massive by both of the political Parties.
Until the South Carolina primary, on February 29th, in which the vast majority of the voters were Blacks, Bernie Sanders was believed (on the basis of the prior primaries and the national polls) to be the almost inevitable nominee of the Party, but on 16 April 2019, the New York Times bannered “‘Stop Sanders’ Democrats Are Agonizing Over His Momentum” and reported that the Party’s billionaires were terrified by the possibility that Sanders might actually win the nomination; and on February 23rd, Politico’s headline right after the Nevada primary was “Sanders sends Democratic establishment into panic mode”. Sanders didn’t need the billionaires, but Biden certainly did, just as he always has. And they own him, just as they always have. The Democratic Party is controlled by and for its billionaires, just as much as the Republican Party is.
If the leadership give you two cups of poison and say that in order to participate in politics as a voter, you must drink one of them, and that this drinking by you constitutes “democracy,” then which cup will you take, and what will you do with it? What will you do with that poisoned chalice? What will you do with it?
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
The worst US election in decades. either vote 3rd party or try to argue whether Trump or Biden are 91% evil to the other’s 90%. The US process has completely failed.
It has failed, but in the same breath the mechanisms that lead to its failure could also contribute to is success.
Say if a respected billionaire comes to the fore and says hey if i contribute $250,000 will you meet with me when you are president. And such a meeting is arranged, and great progress is begun because of the donation and meeting, then people would overlook the system that failed them and say, yes, this is what we needed, we just couldn’t see it at first.
Is Biden or Trump worth risking the possibility catching a case of cornavirus?
And Mr. T isn’t cut from the same cloth, because he’s not as equally owned? LOL
Here’s the only exception to the ironclad rule ‘never trust or believe any damn thing any politician says’. 50 years ongoing, & even truer now than it was then:
There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican parties.”
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10021734059
If the leadership give you two cups of poison and say that in order to participate in politics as a voter, you must drink one of them, and that this drinking by you constitutes “democracy,” then which cup will you take, and what will you do with it? What will you do with that poisoned chalice? What will you do with it?
Refuse both, which is the whole point of their offering up two poisoned chalices in the first place. Voting was always a fool’s game, it’s just that now they’re no longer being discrete about it. The point of elections these days is 1. enormous economic churn for the elite chattering classes at a time when the US needs all it can get , 2. hyperbolic entertainment for the feeble-minded who still believe in such things, and 3. live media rehearsals in the fine art of public deception for the pols who would be king. (How many words can you waste while expounding on absolutely nothing, while also sounding vaguely articulate?) Only the finest hucksters among them shall pass the public trial-by-fire and collect the virtually unlimited life-long riches that accrue to the winners. A perverse beauty pageant of sorts, if you will.
I was hoping that a reader-comment would be answering the question at the end by saying something like “Throw its contents into their face.” I don’t think that merely to not vote is sufficient. Things have by now gotten well beyond that point, don’t you think? How bad is it, by now? How bad were things on 4 July 1776? At what point are we now?
Eric Zuesse,
Indeed. Throw it in their face is the immediate spontaneous reaction, but this will only land you in prison, removing another useful participant from the resistance that will overcome. We need rational, incremental plans and actions to lay the infrastructure that will allow the eventual uprising. It cannot be a spontaneous, ad-lib million man march by supporters of (Bernie, Trump or the next flavor of populist leader). It has to be a long-planned grass roots movement of like-minded individuals organized into effective community groups that are dedicated to protecting their members. These groups must be loosely affiliated but must share some common sense values, the first of which is an understanding that the billionaire class, through its media mouthpieces, will pit the populists against each other. The left and right populists must reunite, agree that they face a common enemy, and understand that fighting this common enemy is enough to bind them together. In other words, there is no need for them to agree on the long list of peripheral issues put in front of the American public on a daily basis. Outcomes must be the goals.
Elections in USA have always been controlled by the ultra wealthy.
Bills in Congress are either passed or failed according to the sentiments of the ultra wealthy. Perfect correlation. What the wealthy want is the end result.
There is zero correlation with the sentiments of the other socioeconomic classes.
Feudal society with lipstick.
Hi Eric – I saw this interesting 9 minute video about Ukraine by Douglas Valentine
https://youtu.be/jRicZc-cZ0I
The state of Delaware is where most US corporations are located and buy their charters – if it is not the world’s biggest corporate tax haven the state is certainly among the world’s top five. It should be no surprise why Delaware senator Joe Biden was chosen
A newsworthy day is not where small trucks got flipped over in the street from a strong wind or an orhpanage gets burnt down but where sexual assult is mentioned then you will see neighbourhood politicians hanging on to fence posts for dear life for fear of being swept away. In that regard I cannot imagine any female being infatuated with Joe Biden without first being given a general anaesthetic.
Sadly until it implodes or explodes in paroxyms of wailing and gnashing teeth … I do not think much else will happen…..unless big groups of important influential people such as Noam Chomsky etc band together and demand that the peoples deserve better.