And so it has come to cross.
United States President Joe Biden has dropped out of this 12 months’s presidential race, bowing to strain from fellow Democrats who feared that his prepare wreck of a efficiency within the June presidential debate with Republican candidate Donald Trump – amongst different episodes – would render the octogenarian lower than interesting to the US voters.
A lot for Biden’s decree that solely the “Lord Almighty” might persuade him to withdraw from the race. Or possibly the Lord had a hand in it, in spite of everything.
To make sure, Biden’s Democratic colleagues did have some extent – not that Trump or another choice, Republican or Democrat, is preferable in a dedicated plutocracy the place poll selections usually vary from the transparently sociopathic to the much less transparently so.
However Biden’s latest verbal gaffes – together with such assertions as that he’s the “first Black lady to serve with a Black president” within the US – did recommend that he was maybe not correctly positioned to proceed because the commander of the worldwide superpower, linguistically or in any other case.
Objectively talking, too, his operate in the course of the previous 9 months as abettor-in-chief of Israel’s genocide within the Gaza Strip is decidedly lower than charming. However in his July 21 presidential race withdrawal submit on the social media platform X, Biden most well-liked to look on the brilliant aspect, assuring his “Fellow People” that the US had “made historic investments in rebuilding our Nation, in reducing prescription drug prices for seniors, and in increasing reasonably priced well being care to a document variety of People”.
This can be information to many People nonetheless fighting medical payments and overpriced prescribed drugs. Certainly one of them would have been my very own father, a Texas-born US citizen who died of prostate most cancers within the nation’s capital Washington, DC, in August 2023 on the age of 72, after being lured into profitable chemotherapy therapies by his docs which did nothing however speed up his demise.
My dad had moreover been prescribed the prostate most cancers drug Xtandi, a medicine that had been developed with US taxpayer cash however not for the aim of, um, “reducing prescription drug prices for seniors” – as was evident from my mother and father’ invoice of a minimum of $14,579.01 for a single month’s provide of Xtandi.
Anyway, that’s US capitalism for you – which regrettably will not be something that may be cured through a democratic electoral charade.
Biden’s seemingly substitute within the presidential race is his present vp, Kamala Harris. Whereas pundits debate her deserves on mainstream media, the one predominant query is exactly what is going to turn out to be of the entire cash raised on behalf of 1 plutocrat relatively than one other.
As an Al Jazeera article printed within the aftermath of Biden’s withdrawal notes: “With no precedent for the present scenario, questions have swirled over the destiny of Biden’s battle chest. Within the US, in spite of everything, election spending can run into hundreds of thousands, if not billions, of {dollars}”.
With so many hundreds of thousands and billions swirling round, then, there’s clearly not a lot likelihood for literal democracy. This regardless of Biden’s sentimental declare in his X submit that “none of this might have been achieved with out you, the American folks. Collectively, we overcame a as soon as in a century pandemic and the worst financial disaster because the Nice Despair. We’ve protected and preserved our Democracy”.
Whereas Biden is retreating from his re-election bid, he’s not stepping down from the workplace of the presidency. He has made clear that he considers serving the remainder of his time period to be “in one of the best curiosity of my celebration and the nation” and that he shall be specializing in his “duties as President”.
Amongst his prime “duties” that presently require fulfilling is receiving on Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the White Home – since genocide is definitely within the “greatest curiosity of my celebration and the nation”.
As People course of the entire electoral switcheroo, they might do properly to ponder the plutocratic panorama of their nation.
In his goodbye missive, Biden signed off with the phrases: “I consider at this time what I at all times have: that there’s nothing America can’t do – once we do it collectively. We simply need to do not forget that we’re the US of America.”
And that’s what everybody ought to keep in mind in the long run: that the US is the US regardless of who’s on the helm and there’s “nothing America can’t do” when it comes to inflicting international agony.
Biden could also be out of the race however American “democracy” – that’s, plutocracy – carries on.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
