Democrats cheer on the election of George W. Bush to take the place of Trump
Biden is backed by former Bush officials, defense companies, tech giants, banks, and other corporations, but hey, at least he's not Trump.
In August 2020, a letter began circulating among delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Steadily amassing more than 275 signatures, the message warned that Joe Biden's foreign policy circle is "a horror show" of advisers with track records of supporting "disastrous" US military interventions.
"We ask you not to rely on foreign policy advice from those who may have a conflict of interest as a result of their relationships and lobbying on behalf of merchants selling weapons and surveillance technology," the letter reads.
Some of the names mentioned include Biden's long-time chief aide on foreign affairs Antony Blinken, who co-founded a company that assisted a Pentagon effort to enhance drone warfare; Libya war cheerleaders Samantha Power and Jake Sullivan; Michèle Flournoy, who worked several years for the Boston Consulting Group as the firm accrued multi-million dollar contracts with the military; and Avril Haines, a former CIA deputy director responsible for making redactions to a report on President George W. Bush's use of torture and later, assisting the Obama administration with extra-judicial drone strikes.
In early November 2020, the post-election Biden team dropped some other cabinet additions: Kathleen Hicks, Andrew Hunter and Melissa Dalton, all former employees of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank that receives contributions from arms makers like Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon; and Susanna Blume and Ely Ratner, who both have ties to the Center for a New American Security, a think tank that enjoys hefty donations from Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin.
Despite his cabinet being stacked to the stars with warmongers, the JoeBiden.com 2020 presidential campaign website paints a very different picture. Tucked away behind a foreign policy tab hidden from the front page and nestled under a category titled "Restoring America's Moral Leadership", Biden claims his administration will "reaffirm the ban on torture and restore greater transparency in our military operations, including policies instituted during the Obama-Biden administration to reduce civilian casualties."
But how can this be possible if - as the delegates warned in their letter - Biden is filling his administration with warmongers, torturers, defense industry goons, and drone bombers?
The answer is that someone is lying - and to the surprise of absolutely no one - that someone is a politician, a fact that becomes immediately obvious when Biden's record on issues like torture and civilian casualties is examined a little closer.
During the 2008 presidential election, Obama/Biden claimed they would hold Bush officials accountable for any wrongdoing - including torture. But that never happened, even after the mostly forgotten CIA torture report from 2014 showed that the agency had been doing some pretty horrific things to detainees while Bush was president.
"Reaffirming" bans on torture is a tough game when you're the VP of an administration that is not only willing to pardon abuse under previous administrations, but is also guilty of conducting its own human rights nightmares - evident by the brutal force-feeding hunger-striking inmates at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to by Obama/Biden, and their gross mistreatment of whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
Likewise, any promises that Biden will work to "reduce civilian casualties" should be taken with a grain of salt considering his vote for the 2003 invasion of Iraq - which helped spill the blood of at least a million Iraqis - along with his body count as Obama's VP, where he helped drop a record number of bombs on the Muslim world.
Seeing as how Biden's very long political record is built on the bones of many, many innocent civilians slaughtered by policy he has supported, it's difficult to believe him when he claims to be interested in saving lives.
And on a similar note, while Biden says he wants to end the "forever wars" in Afghanistan and Iraq, he is simultaneously talking about keeping a presence in both countries. (While also continuing to meddle in Syria.) Ending a war means no remaining troops, not a troop reduction - unless of course you live in a world where you believe war is peace.
Aside from Biden's doublespeak on ending current US occupations, at least three new countries have also appeared on his imperial radar:
"Biden will launch a top-to-bottom review of our funding to Central America to determine how we can build on a successful initiative from the Obama-Biden administration that secured concrete commitments from the leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to take on the corruption, violence, and endemic poverty that drive migration."
Biden also continues to push the debunked pro-war narrative that the US needs to keep blocking Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons while sustaining an "ironclad commitment to Israel's security" - a phrase historically used by previous US presidents to suggest their willingness to continue providing Israel with weapons and money to commit unpunished war crimes against Palestinians.
And while he pledges to keep pumping US taxpayer dollars into the Israeli military - and most likely the Saudi dictatorship as well (despite recent claims to the contrary), it's worth mentioning that Biden will also continue feeding an already bloated Pentagon budget while building on the "Space Force" created by the Trump administration.
Further down the campaign website, Biden says that he will work with technology companies to "ensure their algorithms and platforms are not empowering the surveillance state..."
Again, this is another distortion.
Not only did the Obama/Biden administration prosecute a record number of government whistleblowers under the Espionage Act (including NSA whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, who was directly targeted by Biden) but they also repeatedly renewed the highly invasive Patriot Act, a bill that was actually modeled after legislation Joe Biden helped create following the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing. Additionally, Biden's 2020 presidential bid was largely funded by the same "technology companies" he now supposedly plans to regulate, including Amazon, Facebook, and Google's parent company.
On immigration, the Biden website pledges to "end the horrific practice of separating families at our border and holding immigrant children" - stopping short of outright promising to eliminate the cages immigrant children would be kept in and oddly failing to mention that those cages were actually built and used during the Obama/Biden years.
Similarly, Biden neglects to mention the record deportations that took place when he was Obama's VP, or the fact that he has no plans to tear down Trump's border wall, which was actually constructed to replace older and weaker fencing built under the Obama administration.
While Biden did vow not to build "another foot" of physical wall along the US-Mexico border, any accolades are immediately diminished by the fact that he favors a "digital wall" instead - an idea that would include 160ft. surveillance towers along the border and quite possibly aerial drones as well.
It's especially challenging to give him credit in this area when his past views on immigration sound a lot like Trump. Speaking to a rotary club in S. Carolina, 2006, Biden said:
"Folks, I voted for a fence, I voted, unlike most Democrats -- and some of you won't like it -- I voted for 700 miles of fence. But, let me tell you, we can build a fence 40 stories high -- unless you change the dynamic in Mexico and -- and you will not like this, and -- punish American employers who knowingly violate the law when, in fact, they hire illegals. Unless you do those two things, all the rest is window dressing. Now, I know I'm not supposed to say it that bluntly, but they're the facts, they're the facts. And so everything else we do is in between here. Everything else we do is at the margins. And the reason why I add that parenthetically, why I believe the fence is needed does not have anything to do with immigration as much as drugs. And let me tell you something folks, people are driving across that border with tons, tons, hear me, tons of everything from byproducts for methamphetamine to cocaine to heroin and it's all coming up through corrupt Mexico."
Biden's immigration and foreign policies are only made infinitely more troubling by his connections to neoconservatives, and even former Bush officials, who formed a fundraising group specifically designed to campaign on his behalf. In return for their support, Biden has essentially vowed to uphold their plans to move the US empire beyond Iraq and closer to a hot war with Russia and China.
Formed in 2009, Foreign Policy Initiative is the new "think tank" compromised of the same neocons that spearheaded the push for a US war against Iraq, the Obama's Afghanistan troop surge, and later, the disastrous invasion of Libya in 2011.
The mission statement for Foreign Policy Initiative begins by proclaiming that the "United States remains the world's indispensable nation" - which should sound familiar - because Biden has used the phrase "indispensable nation" when referring to the US. As he said in 2017, "It is my hope and expectation that the next President and Vice President, and our leaders in Congress, will ensure that the United States continues to fulfill our historic responsibility as the indispensable nation."
The Foreign Policy Initiative statement continues by listing a number of threats to US security, including "rogue states", "failed states", "autocracies", and "terrorism" while focusing primarily on the "challenges" posed by "rising and resurgent powers", of which only China and Russia are named. As detailed by History Commons, the neocons "argue that the 21st century will be dominated by an apocalyptic struggle between the forces of democracy, led by the US, and the forces of autocracy, led by China and Russia. [They] call for the establishment of a League of Democracies to oppose China and Russia; the FPI statement stresses the need for 'robust support for America's democratic allies'. Apparently, confrontation with China and Russia will be the centerpiece of FPI's foreign policy stance, a similar position to that taken by the Bush administration before the 9/11 attacks."
Compare Foreign Policy Initiative's wording to Biden's:
"Democracies can and must confront the rise of populists, nationalists, and demagogues; the growing strength of autocratic powers and their efforts to divide and manipulate democracies..."
And speaking of China and Russia, Biden started waging his administration's propaganda campaign against the two nuclear superpowers at the 2020 debate, offering an evidence-free claim that both countries (plus Iran) have been meddling in US elections and promising "they will pay a price" if he's elected.
Biden also openly bragged about needlessly provoking China by sending US planes into disputed territory over the South China Sea:
"When I met with Xi, and when I was still Vice President, he said 'we're setting up air identification zones in the South China Sea, you can't fly through them.' I said, 'we're gonna fly through them. We just flew B52/B1 bombers through it. We're not going to pay attention.'"
Biden would likely continue sailing warships near islands claimed by China, conducting operations known as Freedom of Navigation Operations - which are deliberately designed to challenge Beijing's territorial claims and began during the Obama/Biden years.
In November 2020, Biden reiterated an Obama-era pledge that the US would come to Japan's defense in the event of a conflict with China over the contested islands.
On the JoeBiden.com website, Biden also claims that he will "strengthen our alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia and other Asian democracies..." Not coincidentally, all of these countries have steadily worked with the US to militarily encircle China.
As for Russia, VP Biden and President Obama deployed an array of provocative maneuvers against the country, including supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine, sending US planes near Russian airspace in the Baltic, deploying US tanks and troops near Russia's land borders, and targeting the country with harsh economic sanctions.
More recently, Biden has also fallen in lockstep with the neocons by parroting baseless claims about Russian interference in US elections. (Unless Democrats win those elections, of course.) In 2017, he warned that Russia wants to undermine the "international order". In January 2020, Biden said Russia "fears a strong NATO" and referred to it as "the most effective political-military alliance in modern history." To counter Russian aggression, Biden says, "we must keep the alliance's military capabilities sharp while also expanding its capacity to take on non-traditional threats, such as weaponized corruption, disinformation and cybertheft. We must impose real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms and stand with Russian civil society..."
During his presidential debates with Trump, Biden admitted: "I believe Russia is an opponent. I really do. And, look, Putin's overwhelming objective is to break up NATO, to fundamentally alter the circumstance in Europe, so he doesn't have to face an entire NATO contingent, any one country he is stronger than."
More needless US tensions with nuclear superpowers Russia and China, more needless blood spilled in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, more defense spending, more government surveillance - and absolutely no accountability for any of it. These will be some of the key characteristics of Biden's presidency.
Trump's loss of the White House should ideally be cause for exactly the kinds of widespread national applause witnessed after the media declared his loss of the presidency, but how can any genuinely meaningful celebration happen in light of what we are getting in his place?
Much like Trump, Biden is a warmongering, corporate-owned racist with multiple sexual assault accusations levied against him. However, unlike Trump - and what arguably makes Biden infinitely more dangerous - is the favorable portrayal he receives in the media. That favorable coverage will not only make his neocon-driven foreign policy goals much easier to achieve, but it will also help veil his continuation and expansion of the chilling post-9/11 infrastructure he has inherited - and at times, helped build.
That infrastructure includes the ability to spy on Americans domestically, torture with impunity, and take military action against any country around the world, at any time, without Congress, thanks to the Bush years; a modernized nuclear weapons arsenal, the ability to redefine what constitutes an enemy combatant, the ability to conduct drone strikes against US citizens, and the ability to detain US citizens without due process, thanks to the Obama years; and upgrades to a border wall, the cancellation of requirements by the US government to annually report drone strike victims, and the creation of a "Space Force" to militarize space, thanks to the Trump years. Throughout all three administrations, anti-war voices in the two dominant political parties have nearly vanished, the military budget has skyrocketed, all while the police continue to grow more aggressive, more militarized, and less accountable for wrongdoing against the public.
When all of this is inevitably passed on to Joe Biden and the neocons, former Bush officials, defense companies, tech giants, banks, and other corporations backing his presidency, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief because hey,
at least he's not Trump.