Caitlin JOHNSTON
There has never been a better time to be a woman, minority or member of the LGBT community who works in the DC establishment and thinks the poor should be made into pet food.
The New York Times has published an article titled “Could Limiting Corporate Candidates Hurt Biden’s Diversity Push?”, for the benefit of all those normal everyday readers who’ve been lying awake at night wondering if limiting corporate candidates might hurt Biden’s diversity push.
The article’s authors warn against the nonexistent, completely imaginary threat of the next presidential administration rejecting corporatists for cabinet positions to appease the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, claiming that doing so would be “narrowing the candidate pool” in a way that hurts Biden’s stated aim of creating an administration that is as diverse as America. Because apparently executive positions in the corporate and financial sector are the only place you can find ethnic minorities in America.
“Groups from the far left throw out edicts, but these don’t reflect the realities of the American experience or inequality, the racial wealth gap, and may prove counterproductive to diversify the administration and to implement policies that work for all Americans,” NYT is told by a member of the influential DC lobbying firm Mehlman Castagnetti.
The New York Times just published an article insinuating that the government can only find qualified people of color on Wall Street, but not elsewhere https://t.co/1wmeGX85yf
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) November 20, 2020
The New York Times is warning of the pressing danger of the Biden administration conceding too much to “the far left” at a time when progressive politicians have reportedly already been ruled out as candidates for cabinet positions due to concerns of appearing to be too far left, and when members of the Biden camp are already waving off demands from progressives using the phrase “we don’t negotiate with terrorists”.
Vox has also put out an article celebrating diversity without regard to policies or behavior titled “President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team is one of the most diverse ever”, subtitled “Biden wants his administration to ‘look like America.’ His transition team is a start.”
“Thus far, 46 percent of Biden’s transition staff are people of color and 41 percent of senior staff are people of color,” Vox reports. “More than half of the transition staff — 52 percent — are women, and 53 percent of senior staff are women.”
Meanwhile exactly zero percent of them oppose war, nuclear brinkmanship, starvation sanctions and imperialism. Zero percent oppose US oligarchy or its sociopathic intelligence agencies. Zero percent support universal healthcare or redistributing the nation’s immense wealth to end poverty in the United States. Zero percent support ending the drug war, ending the prison-industrial complex, ending the US police state, ending mass surveillance. Zero percent oppose Israeli apartheid, oppose internet censorship, oppose mass media propaganda via US plutocracy.
Real diversity in any government is of course important. But what you don’t see Vox reporting on is the fact that Biden’s transition and advisory teams are packed to the gills with corporate cronies and war whores, and that the women he’s eyeing for key foreign policy positions are as murderous and depraved as any man anywhere on earth. They might be diverse in gender, skin color and sexual orientation, but in terms of bloodshed, exploitation and oppression they couldn’t be more homogeneous. They are all devout acolytes of the murderous, imperialist, oligarchic religion that is the mainstream consensus of the US political/media class.
— Christopher Dekki ن (@CDekki) November 21, 2020
But that’s all you’re ever going to get out of the Democratic establishment. Taking away power from the warmongers and plutocrats in any way, shape or form has been completely ruled out as a possibility, so all they have to offer in terms of “progress” is giving prominent positions to those few women, minorities and LGBT individuals who happen to be fine with choking people to death with neoliberal austerity at home and dropping cluster munitions on children abroad. That’s what “progress” looks like in a power establishment that is built on a foundation of violence, oppression and theft.
And of course the people who will be hurt worst by it are members of those very same marginalized communities you’re supposed to get excited about being elevated to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy or whatever under the Biden administration. They are hurt by the austerity policies, they are hurt by the authoritarian police state policies, they are hurt by the fact that they’re the ones getting bombs dropped on them overseas, and they are hurt by the fact that there is still so very far to go in terms of racial and sexual equality yet the thrust toward getting there is being diverted into a pussyhat parade for Susan Rice as Secretary of State.
The most influential news reporting should be that which holds power to account and draws attention to its most malignant aspects. Instead it is actively facilitating the most malignant aspects of power and hiding them under the banner of “diversity”.
