Cross posted from Real Clear Politics by Steve Cortes
The Democrats will surely stage an impressive extravaganza this week, full of Hollywood glitz and showmanship. But a peek behind the curtain of this “Wizard of Oz” convention exposes a corrupt and feeble man, pretending to be something he is not.
Joe Biden will drone on about his concern for regular people, but his record and his policy agenda reveal exactly the opposite. In many ways, 2020 will replicate the 2016 contest, pitting Donald Trump’s vision of nationalism and sovereignty vs. Biden’s embrace of globalism and concomitant acquiescence to China.
Yes, the 2020 Democrats and their standard-bearer embolden and try to legitimize the most extreme left elements of American politics. Previously fringe positions like banning fracking and confiscating firearms have suddenly become sacrosanct to Biden-Harris Democrat operatives. But beneath that clearly palpable problem, an obscure yet more elemental threat persists: the designs of globalist power brokers of American big business and big government. These elites of giant multinational corporations and the permanent political class clearly embrace a potential Biden-Harris presidency as their chance to subvert the America First agenda and rewind the clock backward to the globalist era.
In fact, these elites can tolerate the ascent of radicals so long as the larger globalist political reconquest succeeds, via Biden and Harris in the White House. The foremost goal for these titans, largely from Big Tech and Wall Street, is to reassert the decades-long pre-Trump policies of supplication to China. These corporations may be American-headquartered, but they gladly toss aside patriotism, and even any concern for human rights, in order to gain a cheap flow of goods from Chinese supply lines and to gain access to China’s domestic markets via partnership with the Chinese state-run enterprises. But President Trump stands in the way as he confronts the Beijing regime, demanding fairness and reciprocity in trade. Even more, he forcefully exposes the abuses of the Chinese Communist Party, both internally versus its own people and externally against the world, especially regarding the CCP deception that quite literally infected the globe with the Wuhan virus.
In contrast to Trump, the globalist intelligentsia know that Biden will do their bidding and return America to a pre-2016 posture vs. the world, and especially China. After all, Biden spent much of his half-century career in the Washington swamp facilitating the export of American jobs overseas, mostly from places like Sheboygan, Wis., to places like Shanghai. For example, then-Sen. Joe Biden strenuously advocated for the inclusion of Communist China into the World Trade Organization on terms highly favorable to Beijing in 2001. Over the next dozen years the United States lost 3.2 million jobs to China, 2.4 million of them in manufacturing, per an Economic Policy Institute study. Oblivious to this economic carnage, as vice president, Joe Biden had the temerity to declare in a 2011 speech that “a rising China is a positive, positive development, not only for China, but for America.” As Biden uttered that Pollyanna nonsense to his Davos-credentialed CEO fanboys, America’s industrial heartland endured devastation.
Those same C-suite captains of industry also clamor for a plentiful supply of cheap labor. As such, they celebrate Biden’s pledge to extend U.S. taxpayer-funded health care to any migrants who choose, on their own terms, to effectively break-and-enter into the United States. Biden’s border approach is so extreme that he promises full citizenship to tens of millions of illegal migrants. Combined with running mate Kamala Harris’s call for decriminalizing the act of trespassing into our country, what would possibly stop anyone from entering our nation at their leisure? But, again, the globalist elites welcome this de facto liquefying of our country’s borders. After all, only the “deplorables” suffer the consequences of suddenly crowded labor markets in the trades, plus the ravages of totally preventable criminality that emanates from some segments of the illegal population.
Plutocrats wishing to send America backward to globalism see an ally with a dependable track record in Biden. The slow-growth Obama-Biden economic recovery was a slog for laborers who saw their wages languish and their costs soar. But those two terms were halcyon days for the elites, as the already-successful owners of assets prospered like never before, propelling a massive and widening wealth disparity.
Consider, for example, that during the eight years of Biden’s vice presidency, only the top 10% of earners saw their household net worth increase. The bottom 90% of American strivers, the forgotten men and women, all lost wealth. In stark contrast to the corporate media creation of “Lunch Bucket Joe,” the real record of Biden exposes a committed Delaware corporatist who, when in power, exacerbated economic inequality in our land. Minorities particularly suffered. According to Federal Reserve data, during Biden’s two terms, median black households lost a staggering 30% of their net worth. Though part of that loss resulted from the economic calamity of the 2008-09 credit crisis, the wider disparity between white and black households persisted all the way through the end of Biden’s second term.
In contrast, a Washington Post analysis found that during the first three years of Trump’s presidency, before COVID-19 halted global growth, of the 5.2 million jobs created in America, an astounding 4.5 million of them went to minorities. That job growth also produced wage acceleration that mostly benefited previously lagging groups, as black wage growth exceeded that of whites; blue-collar earners’ pace surpassed that of white-collar workers; and non-college grads outperformed those with degrees.
The choice for November is clear. American strivers will repudiate the false “wizard” Biden and his globalist priorities, and rally again to the Trump principles of economic nationalism, American sovereignty, and the diffusion of power.
