Billionaires bailing on Biden? People prefer progressives

American writer and political analyst Daniel Patrick Welch has said that, despite oligarchs' tight control over US elections, a beleaguered people expect real solutions from a broken system.

Welch said that former US Vice President Joe Biden “is an embarrassment,” and that oligarchs have tried hard to make him The Guy, but he just can't cut it.

He made the remarks in an exclusive interview with Press TV on Tuesday while commenting on a new poll which suggests that Biden’s support in the race for the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination is slipping.

According to a new survey from Monmouth University Poll, Biden, once viewed as the favorite to win the nomination, has lost much of his support amid a host of gaffes that have severely marred his image and allowed his rivals to catch up.

The survey showed that the former vice president’s support has dropped to 19 percent. That’s a double-digit decline from June, when Biden topped the Democratic pack with 32 percent in the same poll in June.

Biden’s fall from grace has given a boost to Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who both overtook the former VP to top the crowded Democratic primary field at 20 percent.

Survey might not be ‘completely accurate’

Commenting to Press TV, Welch said, “I don’t think that the news that Biden’s popularity is fading is completely accurate. I would say that it is finally being exposed as the fraud that it always was. You got to remember that in one of these early polls they forgot to mention that they excluded voters under 50, in their sampling.

“You know the whole thing has been to try to push a neoliberal in the mould of Obama, Clinton and Reagan basically to smooth the transition from the embarrassment like Trump into another embarrassment like Biden,” he said.

“And you can see in this poll that his rating among the under 50s is like six percent. It’s exactly – they are hiding something big. I mean I have to say that right away as a disclaimer--the whole thing is just what in US vernacular is called a shit-show. It’s a circus. It’s about oligarchs choosing who the next person to sit in the office will be, not be about the expression of popular will because it’s an oligarchy, and not a democracy,” he added.

“But I guess it’s like commenting on the Super Bowl. You know we go through this every four years, and it’s instructive to analyze. And I famously made a bad prediction in 2016 when I said [Sanders] was going to win the nomination and the election because that was a choice the oligarchs would take to keep the wars going and buy some social peace,” he said.

“And the thing I will take from that was I was naïve in my estimation of the greed of these people who are sitting on trillions of dollars and cannot allow a single hint of resistance or defiance to their rule because then it might all come tumbling down. They are basically the embodiment of Rockefeller’s famous quote about when you get to be that rich how much is enough?’ And he said: ‘Just a little more,’” he noted.

‘Sanders is not a neoliberal’

“So the changes that both Sanders and Warren are embracing are not radical by any historical standards. But they are challenging in the sense that they are non-incremental, they are not neoliberal, at least on Sanders’ part,” Welch said.   

“And I would say—still—that this is the embodiment of a large section of the popular will in the country. Like an unofficial president, like Lula in Brazil, for example—one who embodies the popular will and is prevented from leading by the machinations of the ruling class,” he observed.

“In this sense the call to reject incrementalism is hugely important because people in the bottom 80%  have never recovered from the last recession and they are scared to death about this one. They don’t care about the stock market—it doesn’t affect them because they don’t own anything,” he said.

“But the idea of health care, which people are scared to death about. Even non-incremental changes—still not radical, but Medicare for All; a change in the Incarceration State, the racist system of mass incarceration that Sanders has openly challenged. With exceptions—the thing about private prisons is that state prisons suck too, so it’s not [exactly radical],” he said.

‘Stuck-in-the-mud left imperialists’

“And I would say that neither of the so-called progressives in the race present any challenge to the idea of American exceptionalism and the idea of militarism in general. I will say that Sanders has come close when someone asked him how he’s going to pay for all this,” the analyst stressed.

“That’s the big thing, right? Like it’s candy. Like you’re a family at Halloween and you’re giving out too much candy or whatever. And you fail to realize that it’s all our money to begin with, right? It’s just that most of it goes to the war machine. And he said ‘we’re going to have to take a hard look at the military budget.’ That’s the first time I’ve heard him say anything like that—or any candidate, for that matter,” he said.

“Now, it’s a pretty tepid thing, but it’s a huge challenge. The problem is that both of them [Sanders and Warren] are terrible on Palestine, terrible on Venezuela, China, Russia… real kind of stuck-in-the-mud left imperialists,” he pointed out.

What people want

“My takeaway is that, as in 2016, I think that the people want a candidate who is more in line with their own views, which really is just caring about some of the things that are killing us: the crippling debt, the lack of access to health care, the injustice system, our kids being shot by police—all of those things that are real for tens of millions of Americans,” Welch said.

“But they won’t go far enough to actually challenge the oligarchy. They don’t challenge exceptionalism, they don’t challenge militarism in those exact terms. And so for me it could go two ways: One is that they [progressive candidates] might be acceptable if they [the oligarchs] can’t get enough [any other way], so they might pick a progressive because meh, what the hell, we’re sitting on trillions of dollars. What’s a $15 minimum wage to buy some social peace?” he asked.

What oligarchs want

“The other way is that they know that they can’t hide from the popular will and they’ll just go full on fascist. And I think that’s why I was wrong the last time. What do they want? They want it all. They don’t want to make any concessions because they are afraid that if they make a single concession it threatens the House of Cards,”  he pointed out.

“I had a friend ask me ‘what is it with someone who has a billion dollars? What is it about the money after a certain point? And I said well it’s the system and the concept—you can’t allow that to be questioned or the whole thing is under [threat]. I mean basically what is rent, except for this idea that you have to give me some money because I have more than you to begin with?” he said.

“And so the ethos, or the lack of morality of the whole system is threatened by any sort of challenge. And I think that the increasingly fascist response, and the militarized response, both at home and globally, is a sign that they are quite scared (the oligarchs, that is) that any sort of shaking in the foundation of this house of cards is quite realistic in terms of its threat to them,” he said.

“It used to be that they could just work their way around it. There is a folk song that talks about The Dragon:

And so it learned to smile and it learned the art of stealth

Corporate acquisition and deception plunder wealth

Much more cost effectively than fire, tooth or claw

When it becomes tedious, they simply change the law

“That’s what they do. But we’re beyond that point now. Now it’s guns in the streets. It’s keeping people scared and under wraps—the idea of persecuting Julian Assange, all sorts of truth tellers and whistleblowers,” he said.  

“It’s not be about left- or right-wing extremism. It’s about us. People who dare to question the system have to be marginalized, ridiculed, and eventually, silenced. And our job, of course, is to be as loud as we can, and to keep shouting,” Welch stated.

On Wednesday Welch sent a message to Press TV, saying, "I forgot to center my final point, which was this: 'People who dare to question the system have to be marginalized, ridiculed, and eventually, silenced. And our job, of course, is to be as loud as we can, and to keep shouting.'"

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