Above photo: POLITICO illustration / Getty / AP.
It is very important to immediately review the early front-runners for a Biden cabinet in Washington.
Many ‘liberals’ told us not to raise serious issues during the campaign for fear that Biden would lose. But they said they’d be sure to ‘push Biden to the left’ once he was elected.
So far these folks have been out holding rallies calling for Trump to recognize Biden’s ‘victory’.
I see it all as a circus distraction – Trump will leave office and Biden will enter and while the governing style might change a bit the policies will remain deadly similar. Whether foreign or domestic policy, the ‘new administration’ will continue the tradition of both major political parties – to serve as trusted agents of Wall Street and the war machine.
So let’s not hold our breath in expectation that the liberals will come on-side to demand that Biden’s oligarchic team represent the suffering people and our fragile planet. Biden has made it clear that he is out to fix things for the ‘middle class’ and that is a signal to the liberals that you will be taken care of just fine and dandy.
In my neighborhood there were a slew of BLM and Biden for prez yard signs. Now that the campaign is over most of them have been taken down. A few BLM signs are still out there but the majority are gone. Why?
It is probably true that most folks with BLM signs in their yards intellectually believed the message. But putting a sign in the yard (and voting for Biden – the ‘so-called resistance’) is all they likely will do to help.
I also feel the BLM signs, coupled with Biden yard signs, was a plan to use this important and popular issue for party purposes – it was a strategy.
The Dems jumped on the BLM horse and it helped carry them into the White House particularly by recruiting young folks and people of color.
Obama did a similar thing in 2008 when he rode the peace movement horse (due to the intense unrest about George W. Bush’s ‘shock and awe’ attack and occupation of Iraq) into power in Washington.
When Obama arrived at the White House he got off the peace horse and put it in the barn and locked the door. He threw the key into the Potomac River and proceeded to expand the wars into at least seven nations and upped the drone killing program in a dramatic way. No one has seen the horse ever since.
I’ve watched this movie before. It happened when Bill Clinton became president and led the attack and break-up of Yugoslavia and continued the slow bleeding of the Iraqi people with sanctions and occasional military actions. (Remember Madeleine Albright’s famous quote about 500,000 dead children in Iraq being worth the price – see it here.)
So I didn’t expect Obama to do anything to end wars and cut the bloated Pentagon budget. And very few liberals came out to help put the heat on either Clinton or Obama.
It will be the same again with Biden. A high percentage liberals are just fine with what ever happens in Washington as long as their party controls the White House. (I recall how in 2012, during the height of Obama’s drone war, the Washington Post did a survey of self-identified liberals and found that 77% of them supported the program.) They don’t want to be ‘overly negative’ toward their party leadership. They are loyalists. Their claim to have been part of ‘the resistance’ was all illusion. (And a delusion too.)
These two videos (above and below) go over the likely Biden appointments to his cabinet and staff. Each host has different styles. They all know what they are talking about.