By Barry Grey
21 December 2019
21 December 2019
The most striking aspect of
the sixth Democratic presidential candidates’ debate, held Thursday night in
the aftermath of Trump’s impeachment, was the questions that were not asked by
the moderators and the issues that were not addressed by the participants.
The seven candidates for the
Democratic presidential nomination who qualified for the event were former Vice
President Joe Biden, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Senator
Elizabeth Warren, South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Minnesota Senator
Amy Klobuchar, internet entrepreneur Andrew Yang and billionaire businessman
Tom Steyer. National polls show the top three spots held down by Biden, Sanders
and Warren, with Buttigieg leading the rest of the field in single digits.
The candidates repeatedly
stressed the urgency of ousting Trump in 2020 and jousted over which of them
was best placed to accomplish the task. This was combined with populist
rhetoric attacking billionaires and pledges to increase taxes on the rich to
pay for better health care and schools and a more humane immigration policy.
Yet neither the moderators of
the Los Angeles event nor any of the candidates raised the fact that the House
vote approving articles of impeachment against President Trump was bracketed by
congressional votes in which the Democratic Party voted by wide margins to pass
the White House’s key legislative priorities.
These include a massive
increase in military spending, a new North American trade pact (USMCA) directed
particularly against China, and continued funding of Trump’s anti-immigrant
border wall with Mexico.
This convenient omission of
the basic agreement between the Democratic Party and Trump on militarism, trade
war and attacks on democratic rights illuminates the sheer cynicism and
hypocrisy of the event, and the fraud of the Democrats’ posturing as an
alternative to Trump for “working people” or the “middle class.”
Another remarkable omission
was any discussion of the candidates’ policies toward Ukraine. The name of the
country does not even appear in the transcript of the more than two-hour event.
Russia was mentioned only once by name, by Andrew Yang, and the name “Putin”
appears only once, in a remark by former Vice President Biden.
This is extraordinary given
the fact that the debate was held barely 24 hours after the
Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted in a party-line vote to
make Trump the third president in US history to be impeached, based on his
withholding of military aid to US ally Ukraine, said to be waging a “hot war”
against Russian aggression.
There was no discussion of how
the seven candidates, if elected, would reverse Trump’s supposedly “dovish”
posture toward Moscow and escalate the US diplomatic, economic and military
confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia, something which has virtually no
popular support among the American people.
It seemed that both the
moderators, led by “PBS NewsHour” anchor Judy Woodruff, and the Democratic
contenders were eager to dispense with the entire issue of impeachment as
quickly as possible. Woodruff raised it as the first question, noting the
failure of the Democrats in the course of three weeks of public hearings to
generate strong majority support in the country for the removal of Trump from
office. None of the candidates in their answers addressed her question as to
why this was the case and what they would do to build greater support for
impeachment. After a few perfunctory minutes of canned replies, the issue was dropped.
Another omission that, while
entirely predictable, nevertheless underscored the two-facedness of the
Democratic campaign, was the cases of imprisoned journalist Julian Assange and
the whistle-blower Chelsea Manning.
Two so-called “centrist,”
i.e., right-wing, candidates, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, both raised the
issue of freedom of the press to attack Trump for his baiting of the largely
pro-impeachment media. Klobuchar, noting that her father was a newspaperman,
declared that “the freedom of the press is deep in my heart.” But she and the
rest of the Democrats, including the so-called “progressives” Bernie Sanders
and Elizabeth Warren, support the persecution and jailing of Assange and
Manning precisely for exercising press freedom in exposing US war crimes.
On the question of China, the
candidates, if anything, sought to outflank Trump from the right in demanding
an escalation of the US drive to cripple China and prevent it from dislodging
the US as the premier Pacific power. Biden said he would seek UN international
sanctions against China for its alleged human rights abuses against the Muslim
Uighurs.
“We should be moving 60
percent of our sea power to that area of the world,” he declared, “to let, in
fact, the Chinese understand that they’re not going to go any further… we’ve
got to make clear, we are a Pacific power and we are not going to back away.”
Buttigieg said he would
consider boycotting the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Klobuchar said, “I think we
need to keep our promises and keep our threats.”
A major focus of media
post-mortems of the debate was what commentators described as an angry
“eruption” between Buttigieg and Warren. This squabble, however, only exposed
the fraud of the various candidates’ attempts to portray themselves as
clean-hands opponents of the corporate elite.
At one point, Warren, looking
for a way to attack Buttigieg, who has reportedly been climbing at her expense
in Iowa, where the first primary contest will take place in seven weeks, proclaimed
her independence from corporate campaign money and denounced the Indiana mayor
for holding a fundraiser for wealthy donors in a wine cave.
Sanctimoniously stating, “I
will not sell access to my time,” Warren added, “Billionaires in wine caves should
not pick the next president of the United States.”
Buttigieg bluntly defended
taking money from corporate donors and replied coolly, “This is the problem of
issuing purity tests you yourself cannot pass.” He then noted that Warren had
accepted donations from corporations and financial interests in her prior
Senate election campaigns and channeled left-over funds into her presidential
war chest.
As for Vermont Senator Bernie
Sanders, he continued to posture as a populist and quasi-socialist tribune of
working people and bane of the “billionaire class.” He repeated his rhetoric
about a “political revolution”—meaning nothing more than electing him as
president and Democrats to national, state and local office.
He declared, “We are living in
a nation increasingly becoming an oligarchy, where you have a handful of
billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections and
politicians… The issue is not old or young, male or female. The issue is
working people standing up, taking on the billionaire class, and creating a
government and economy that works for all, not just the 1 percent.”
Sanders is fully aware that in
making such statements, he is talking out of both sides of his mouth. That he
has no intention of conducting the type of struggle—requiring a real
revolution—needed to transform the American economy into one that “works for
all,” is revealed by the fact that he is running to represent a party that
supports the same basic policies as the fascist Trump, as demonstrated in the
budget and USMCA votes this week.
This is a party, moreover,
that completed the deregulation of Wall Street under Bill Clinton and responded
to the ensuing crash of 2008 by allocating trillions of tax-payer dollars under
Obama to bail out the criminals responsible for the crisis. The bill for this
rescue operation is still being paid by the working class in the form of mass
layoffs, wage cuts and the destruction of health care, education and pensions.
On the issue of trade war with
China, Sanders staked out a position to the right of other candidates in the
debate. Boasting that he had voted against the now-superseded North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), he said the new pact did not go far enough.
Promoting economic nationalism
to pit US workers against their counterparts south of the border, he said, “It
is not going to stop outsourcing. It is not going to stop corporations from
moving to Mexico, where manufacturing workers make less than $2 an hour.”
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