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Biden fought for the Iran nuclear deal, which is important, as he is likely to reinstate it. A war against Iran will unleash the gates of hell, and Trump is surrounded by hawks and his Saudi and Israeli allies who want regime change in Iran.
In other words, Biden does not promise a progressive foreign policy, but his record suggests he'll be less reckless than Trump. Some Democrats in Congress will provide a break on pressures for new military adventures. More progressives are likely to be elected to the House, which will give an anti-war position more voice.
These are all reasons why the Left should vote for Biden.
A Meeting in Yankee Field
Trump is the buffoon tip of a more coherent fascist spear. Four more years of his "law and order" are perilous. As the pandemic continues and the economic crisis deepens, unemployment will rise. The attacks on workers' living standards will be more brutal, and racists and Nazis will be emboldened.
People will protest and organize to resist. A significant upsurge in the people's movement is likely. The FBI, police, and other state agencies will target the Left and socialists that Trump rails against.
What's left of the institutions of formal democracy will further erode, and the process of fascistization will accelerate.
Historian Gerald Horne quipped the Left could be meeting up on the fields of Yankee Stadium, harkening back to the days of the coup in Chile, where thousands of progressives were rounded up. Many were killed. It may seem far-fetched, but Hitler rose from obscurity to Fuhrer in less than ten years.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson has said we are one serious terrorist attack, real or staged, away from martial law and the end of what's left of constitutional rights.
In 1919, the U.S. deported left-wing citizens whose politics the government didn't like. Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, an architect of McCarthy's campaign to purge the unions of left-wing leaders. COINTELPRO was an FBI plot to attack and kill progressive black leaders and undermine leftwing organizations in the '60s.
I'm not saying it can't happen under a Biden administration, but it's less likely, and won't be as vicious as under a second Trump term.
Diversified Public Ownership Fights Fascistization
If there is to be a serious fight against fascistization, it must include developing public ownership, starting with the banks. FDR saw the need for public ownership if anti-trust laws didn't work. In the 1938 speech he said:
"The power of a few to manage the economic life of the nation must be diffused among the many or be transferred to the public and its democratically responsible government. If prices are to be managed and administered, if the nation's business is to be allotted by plan and not by competition, that power should not be vested in any private group or cartel, however benevolent its professions profess to be.
Those people, in and out of the halls of government, who encourage the growing restriction of competition either by active efforts or by passive resistance to sincere attempts to change the trend, are shouldering a terrific responsibility. Consciously, or unconsciously, they are working for centralized business and financial control. Consciously or unconsciously, they are, therefore either working for control of the government itself by business and finance or the other alternative- a growing concentration of public power in the government to cope with such concentration of private power.
The enforcement of free competition is the least regulation business can expect."
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