https://www.rt.com/op-ed/497418-biden-racist-obama-voters-black/

Black bourgeois misleaders like James Clyburn, Barack Obama, Al Sharpton and Joy Reid should be ashamed of themselves for promoting the racist corporate and imperial clown Joe Biden as the answer to Donald Trump.

RT.com. Aug 10, 2020

During Biden’s first failed White House bid in the 1980s, he bragged about receiving an award from vicious white segregationist George Wallace while campaigning in the South. He even gave a campaign speech in Alabama in which he said “we (Delawareans) were on the South’s side in the Civil War.”

Biden helped author, and worked to pass, the racist federal mass incarceration Three Strikes crime bill of 1994.

During his second failed presidential campaign in 2007, he offered creepy racialized praise for presidential candidate Barack Obama by calling him “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

As a presidential candidate in the current election cycle, Biden has boasted of his ability to work with segregationists as a US senator in the 1970s, when he said that federal desegregation efforts threatened to make his children “grow up in a racial jungle.” He boasts about his ability to work with racist Republicans today.

2020 candidate Biden has said that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” He has defended his past Congressional alliance with racist Jim Crow US Senator James O Eastland by saying that Eastland “never called me ‘boy’” – as if he would have used that word to describe a white congressman. He has tried to endear himself to black voters by telling a bizarre story about an alleged past teenage swimming pool confrontation with a young black tough named “Corn Pop.”

In an odd performance at the Poor People’s Campaign in June 2019, Biden invaded Joy Reid’s personal space and charged her with believing that “there’s nothing you can do” and wanting to “start a real physical revolution” simply because she asked him whether it was realistic to think that a Democratic president could get progressive things done with the racist Republican Party.

Some of this absurdity is about Biden’s obvious mental deterioration. But the white-hot racial cluelessness and condescension of the man is clear as day. Last September, during the third Democratic presidential debate, a black female ABC moderator asked Biden the following question about segregated schools, the legacy of slavery, and his past dismissal of the notion of reparations for slavery:

“Mr Vice President, I want to come to you and talk to you about inequality in schools and race. In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter, ‘I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather… and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago…’ You said that some 40 years ago. But as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”

Biden sneered – yes, sneered (or smirked, if you prefer) and laughed (go here to 2:06:49-53) – as the moderator began her question. Then came Sleepy White Joe’s pathetic, jumbled, evasive, and raving response:

“Well, they have to deal with the – look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Red-lining banks, making sure that we are in a position where – look, you talk about education… make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need – we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are – I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have – make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds go to school. School. Not daycare. School. We bring social workers into homes and parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help. They don’t – they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television – excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the – the – make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school – a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.”

The whole answer was hopelessly absurd. It was not true that Biden’s “deceased wife is a teacher.” (How could she have been decades after her death?) Biden’s current wife was/is not an inner-city teacher: she was an English professor teaching mostly white college students.

Biden’s “record player” line was widely and justly mocked at a comedic level. Late-night television hosts wondered whether Biden simply hadn’t heard about CDs and DVDs yet. A better question: had he never heard of books, and of parents reading to their children?

Did Biden propose, I asked at the time, to initiate a federal program to distribute phonographs to poor families – a “Vinyl New Deal”?

But here were the two main things take critical note of in Biden’s record-player rant:

1) His complete evasion of the main question the ABC moderator asked him – about his 1975 dismissal of the notion that white America owes black America anything for centuries of slavery and Jim Crow.

2) The single most coherent thread in Biden’s response: victim blaming. Consistent with his failure to seriously address segregation (a critical lynchpin of racial inequality, since where one lives is intimately related to the social resources and opportunity one can access) and his total dodging of the reparations question, Biden reflexively defaulted to a vicious neoliberal narrative that placed the blame for black poverty not on institutions, not on the un-addressed and far-reaching and living reach of the slave system and the racist terror regimes that succeeded that system, but on black parents who don’t know how to raise their kids the right way.

The writer Anand Giridharadas got it right. “Is this not one of the most explicitly racist moments of all time in a Democratic primary debate?” Giridharadas tweeted. “Asked about his past comments denying responsibility, as a white man, for America’s sins,” Giridharadas wrote “he gives an answer insinuating that Black parents don’t know how to raise kids….Joe Biden’s answer on how to address the legacy of slavery was appalling…It ended in a sermon implying that black parents don’t know how to raise their own children.”

All this happened well before Obama worked behind the scenes and James Clyburn acted with his powerful South Carolina endorsement to make sure that the clearly demented Biden, and not the social-democratish single-payer health insurance advocate Bernie Sanders, was this year’s Democratic presidential nominee.

Subsequent to securing the nomination, Biden has disgraced himself by telling popular black radio host Charlamagne tha God that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you are for me or for Trump then you ain’t Black if you aren’t voting for me.”

As HipHollywood kindly explained, “the comment may have been directed just at Charlamagne, but it plays into the false notion that Democrats own the black vote and don’t have to earn the black vote. Furthermore, a privileged white man does not get to dictate what is and isn’t black.”

Then Biden took historical racial idiocy to a new level by opining that Trump is the United States’ “first racist president” – a truly bizarre thing to say in the longtime land of chattel slavery and Jim Crow. This insanely ignorant and offensive comment elicited the following understandable response from Charlamagne: “I really wish Joe Biden would shut the F up forever ….because as soon as he opens his mouth and makes noise he gets us all killed.”

And now Biden has insulted black America yet again by telling a convention of non-white journalists that the nation’s black population differs from the nation’s diverse Latinx population by being monolithic.

“As most people don’t know,” Biden said, “unlike the African American community with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community, with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”

Seen against his broader, long-standing record of racial misstatement, it’s hard to take Biden’s apology for this absurd comment very seriously.

Another reason for American progressives to say “gee, thanks, Obama.” Biden is still a presence on the national historical stage in this perilous time thanks to Obama no less than Sarah Palin ever became a presence because of John McCain.

The black-bourgeois mis-leadership class has its hands full trying to sell enthusiasm for Joe Biden to black voters.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/498065-kamala-harris-marxist-leftist/

Kamala Harris is not a ‘left radical’ or a ‘Marxist’. I wish she were
14 Aug, 2020 19:21

Within moments of Joe Biden announcing Kamala Harris as his running mate, the Trump campaign and the American right-wing propaganda machine began portraying the California senator as a “far-left radical” of the “Marxist” variety.
There’s nothing wrong with being a leftist (I am one), but the charge (I might say compliment) is ludicrous and undeserved. Harris has long been firmly lodged on the right wing of the Democratic Party, which Richard Nixon’s former strategist Kevin Phillips accurately described as “history’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party.”

As both a Bay Area prosecutor (1990–2003) and California Attorney General (2003–2016), the Big Business-backed Harris earned a reputation as a friend of the police and an agent of racially disparate mass incarceration. She boasted of her high felony conviction rates, achieved with significant violations of defendant rights. She fought back any attempts to change California’s vicious prison system, institute a criminal justice reform and abolish the death penalty.

She even resisted a court order to release low-risk inmates by arguing that it could cost California an important source of cheap labor to be used, at risk to their lives, to fight wildfires for $2 a day.

She was hardly the “progressive prosecutor” she claimed to have been when announcing her presidential candidacy in 2019.

Anyone who thinks ‘Copmala’ Harris was a criminal justice ‘progressive’ should watch a short TED-style talk she gave on behalf of racist mass incarceration at the Chicago Ideas Week conference in 2015. One really must take in her derisive voice and body language as she launched into a scornful attack on reformers’ supposedly naïve call to move taxpayer money from mass imprisonment to education:

“We all have these posters [sarcastic posture] in our closet [pained look on face] that is attached to a stick that we sometimes will cart out when we’re talking about criminal justice … and we run around with these signs [disdainful face] … ‘Build More Schools, Less Jails! Build More Schools, Less Jails!’ And we walk around everywhere – ‘Build More Schools!’ We protest [mocking face, hand pretending to hold up a placard] … ‘Put money into education, not prisons!’ [loud mocking squeaky voice]. There’s a fundamental problem with that approach, in my opinion. And it’s this: …You have not addressed the reason I have three padlocks on my front door.”

Attorney General Harris and her multimillionaire white husband had “three padlocks on [their] front door” because the class rule and racial oppression system she spent her adult life serving and protecting had reached such stunning levels of savage inequality that the top tenth of the American One Percent possessed as much combined wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent while the median household black-white wealth gap had reached six black cents on the white dollar. These disparities were only worsened by the giant racist mass arrest and incarceration regime that she and her future presidential running mate Joe ‘Three Strikes’ Biden did so much to advance.

During her very brief stint (2017 – present) in the Republican-controlled US Senate, Harris has tried to develop a progressive persona by speaking on behalf of liberal causes such as immigration reform, marijuana legalization and increased pay for schoolteachers. She scored more points with liberals by aggressively questioning Trump’s right-wing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

In her disastrous and prematurely concluded presidential campaign, Harris clumsily tried to play the great game of Americans politics – “the manipulation of populism by elitism” (Christopher Hitchens) – by inauthentically posing as a candidate of “the people.” She briefly took up Bernie Sanders’ call for “Medicare for All” but then reversed herself on ending private health insurance in favor of a federally financed system. She promised to protect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients from deportation and opposed Trump’s border wall with Mexico, but, tellingly, failed to vote against Trump’s network of immigrant detention camps along the US-Mexico border. She backs a boosting of the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, but says nothing about how such an increase would leave millions of workers poor while ineligible for food stamps, housing subsidies and Medicaid.

Harris has also been a big player in the Democrats’ Russiagate campaign, demanding Trump’s impeachment, not for his chilling violations of the US Constitution or his nativist persecution of immigrants, but for being an alleged Russian “stooge.” That has earned her points from the US national security establishment.

Vice presidential candidate Harris will make no calls for a real Green New Deal, genuinely progressive taxation, or single-payer health insurance (Medicare for All), which the arch-corporatist Biden says he would veto – this, even though single-payer is backed by seven in 10 Americans. Biden chose her because she will be safely on board with the corporate agenda while her deceptive progressive pretension and her nonwhite and female identity cloak her loyalty to an American System run by and for the mostly white corporate, financial, and imperial establishment.

It’s an old game in American politics: Democrats posing as populists and progressives when they’re owned by the nation’s imperial ruling class.

Progressive activist Shaun King mocked by all sides for blatant flip-flop on Kamala Harris after Biden makes her running mateProgressive activist Shaun King mocked by all sides for blatant flip-flop on Kamala Harris after Biden makes her running mate
The Republicans are also playing an old game: absurdly labelling corporate and imperial Democrats “totalitarian,” “radical leftists,” “Marxists,” “socialists,” and “communists.” From the New Deal (1932–1940) on, not a single Democratic president or presidential contender (no matter how militantly corporate, imperial, and anti-communist/-socialist), has escaped this “paranoid-style” charge from the American right. (The deeply conservative Barack Obama was ludicrously described as a “socialist,” a “Marxist,” and even a “Marxist-Leninist” by the Tea Party right, even as he governed in strict accord with the interests of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the military-industrial Pentagon System.)

It’s a bit harder than usual for the right to make the neo-McCarthyite charge stick on Biden. He’s an old and conservative, racially problematic white man with a long congressional and vice-presidential record as an abject warmonger and a tool of the corporate class. Things are different with Harris. As a more recent arrival on the national stage, a product of the supposedly radical San Francisco Bay area, and a black female, Harris is much easier to sell to the Republicans’ disproportionately rural, white, and male voting and street-fighting base as a radical, big-city threat.

It’s all very ironic. As with Obama, Harris’s identity attributes help conceal her captivity to the capitalist profits system that the right religiously supports. At the same time, as neither of the two major US parties will ever admit, the United States could use a good dose of the socialism that Kamala Harris and other top Democrats are absurdly accused of supporting. Like something straight out of, well, Marx, the nation’s capitalist ruling class is grinding the American ‘democratic’ experiment into arch-plutocratic dust, rendering longstanding majority-progressive public opinion irrelevant while wealth and power concentrate yet further upwards, and millions of ordinary Americans are thrown out of work, off health insurance, and into poverty and misery in the middle of an epic pandemic.