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But as a leftist, as someone who is far to the left of Biden, I think that we, as you mentioned in your latest article, we should have no illusions about who Biden is. He is certainly not on the left. I would barely call him a liberal, you know. Yes, I understand they have some decent climate skeletal-policy that he's adopting from climate activists that have maybe pushed him farther left than he would have been on this. But he's proclaimed that he will not ban fracking. He's basically said that he won't adhere to the popular demand of even thinking about defunding the police. In fact, he says they need more funding. Pretty much every step of the way vetoing Medicare for All every step of the way he has basically signaled to moderates, at best and really to conservatives kind of running on this ideology of anti-socialism, anti-communism [that he is] discarding that Bernie wing and doubling down on that.
You had Obama campaigning recently for him in Florida saying, "I know Biden. He's not a socialist. Don't worry." It's, like, "Yeah, we know he's not a socialist. [Laughs.] What is your plan for working people suffering during the pandemic? What is your plan to help people who have lost their jobs, lost their health care access?" So, yes, we should have no illusions when it comes to who Biden is.
Luckily, Paul, I live in California. Because of this amazing democracy that we have, the electoral college renders voting mostly symbolic because of this locked-in voting base that we have in every other state except the twelve swing states. So, I don't have to face that moral dilemma of voting for Biden. If I did live in one of those swing states, I think that in this election, like every election, we should not vote-shame people who want to vote for a third party, like I am doing in California, but also not vote-shame people who want to vote for Biden.
I think Trump is an existential threat. I think that he is a unique threat. Unmatched. And we may disagree on this, but I don't think that there will be necessarily a more dangerous version of Trump in 2024, because I think Trump is a unique con artist who has a cult of personality that I don't think that you can garner if you're looking at someone like a Tom Cotton.
It's kind of the perfect storm, right? the reality-stardom, this painting himself as this anti-establishment outsider, the Bannon ideology that he took the mantle of. And he has really galvanized a very dangerous sect of cult fanatics, especially with legitimizing things like QAnon and people like Mark Dice. I mean, it's absolutely bizarre what he has done in the last four years, and I am scared of what that can mean.
Not necessarily him, even though there's many things to be scared of with him because he's so unpredictable and insane. But his base of supporters, these militias, these frenzied people who have complete detachment from reality and who literally think the left, this large umbrella of the left, meaning everyone from Nancy Pelosi on, is the enemy, are coming to burn down their neighborhoods, and they need to essentially foment civil war against us. And, Paul, that to me is the scariest thing of all.
I do think Biden needs to win, but I think that the Biden camp isn't depending on the ultra-left. I think that's a very, very small, minute amount of people who we end up being blamed anyway for whatever the outcome will be. But I think that if you're looking at the grand scheme of things, the nonvoters are the largest bloc that they need to be signaling to and using their six billion dollars on, right? This record-shattering number of campaign spending that they're doing in this election: they need to be spending that money to focus in on the 50 percent of Americans who aren't interested in voting, who don't vote, and get those people to the polls. Because I think the vast majority of Bernie supporters are going to vote for Biden because they agree with us.
Paul JaySo, people who follow my website know I just wrote a piece which you just referred to, that, without illusions, the left should vote for Biden. So, it's out there, what I think on this. I think the most important thing I was trying to say in that article is that what you really get to vote for is, Which section of capital do you want?
I always reference this one quote from the rightwing conservative pundit, George Will. He said in one of the previous elections maybe it was the first Obama election against McCain; he was on the George Stephanopoulos show. And he got really mad because somebody on the show maybe Donna Brazile or someone like that was going on about how many houses McCain had. (Or maybe it was the Romney election; how rich Romney was.)
And Will says, "OK" because he's really getting mad he says, "Let's be serious here." He says, "This isn't really that kind of a democracy. Of course, the elites rule. What you get to choose in an election is which section of the elites you want to rule." And that is the choice because, one, a lot of what I would call the further left, far left they're so far left, I don't consider them actually oppositional anymore. Not all individuals. I would say most of the individuals are probably sincere and well-intentioned people. But as an ideology, this far left position, it so winds up helping the status quo that I'm not sure I would call it oppositional.
But the point here is if you look at the different groupings of sections of capital, of course, the most important being finance, the majority of finance wants the world to be a good place to do business in. They want open markets. They want a certain amount of democracy, especially democracy for the elites.
They don't like kleptocracies, you know, where a family gets hold of a state and then uses that state to enrich themselves. The American government will work with those kinds of places. But, like, why didn't, in the end, they like Gaddafi? Gaddafi, in fact, was playing ball with the Americans. He made a deal with the Bush administration; even helped with the rendering of political prisoners after 9/11.
Yet they still brought him down. Because capital doesn't like these family-controlled states. And I think this is to some extent what's going on in the US. Finance doesn't like this. It's kind of like a family-controlled state. At least they're trying to turn it into that. It's not good for business it's not the best for business.
Even though to quote Larry Fink, who's the head of BlackRock, this enormous asset management company even though Trump, quote unquote, "gave us everything on our bucket list," in terms of tax cuts and deregulation, in the end, it's too chaotic for them. And in terms of foreign policy, who owns the arms manufacturers? Well, it's finance. So, it's not like they don't mind "almost-war." They don't mind rivalry.
But they don't want to so screw up the relationship with China that it's going to impede American business interests in China. Like, BlackRock, for example, has just opened up an index fund on the Chinese stock market, [just] as they have a massive index fund here. You know, an index fund is where you buy an entire range of stock. So, yeah, there's very serious contention with China and it's at a systemic level, but they don't want craziness.
So, what's in the interests of the people here when you have a serious difference between different sections of capital? One section of capital is Trump, the Robert Mercers of this world, Sheldon Adelson, to some extent the Koch brothers they go back and forth a little bit, but mostly they go in the direction I'm about to say: they are for a really coercive state. And the most dangerous thing, probably domestically, Trump's done, amongst many dangerous things maybe it's the second most dangerous thing: the most dangerous is climate denial, as you said is the rallying cry to the fascists.
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