by ROHANA R.WASALA
“Perhaps the Americans and nations around the world who come within their sphere of influence are experiencing the worst possibilities of the American military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned might emerge, unless they were careful, as a result of changes brought about by men like Prescott Bush, Averell Harriman and others.”
Donald Trump is refusing to concede the Joe Biden victory. The word ‘concession’ is not in his vocabulary, it seems! Trump has already made two legal complaints in court over ballot counting and voting deadlines in Pennsylvania, and even threatens to take the election issue to the Supreme Court. For most older Americans, this, no doubt, invokes memories of what happened following the November 7, 2000 US presidential election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore (Albert Arnold Gore). The emerging results were too close to call. Al Gore initiated litigation appealing for a manual recount of the presidential election ballots in the crucial Florida state with its 25 electoral college votes. The Florida supreme court decided in favour of a recount (4-3), but the US Supreme Court overturned that ruling (7-2), thereby effectively awarding the election to George Bush. Most people believed that Bush would not have become president but for this court decision. But such a court outcome is unlikely this time in the case of Trump, according to Steven Mulroy, Professor in Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, and Election Law, at the University of Memphis, Tennessee, USA. He calls Trump’s efforts to wrest victory from Biden’s hands a real long shot. The Trump camp seem least disturbed by such gloomy predictions. His supporters are certain that he will remain president for a second term after January 20, 2021. Trump’s Secretary of State and ex-CIA director Mike Pompeo is adamant that this will be the case and that ‘There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration’.
A day before the November 3rd election (i.e., November 2), political analyst Donald Monaco of the Canadian Global Research organization described the US presidential election as a contest between a “Criminal” and a “Con-artist”, by which he meant, respectively, Biden and Trump. Biden represents, to use an extract from Monaco’s article in the Global Research webpage, ‘The Democrats (who) don the mask of identity politics to conceal their allegiance to the American plutocracy. They pose as defenders of economic and social rights for women, sexual minorities, immigrants, racial minorities, and workers. The politics of the ‘New Democrats’ reeks of hypocrisy as their deeds contradict their words’. In our experience, when Democrats are in power in USA, they start flogging the ‘human rights dead horse’ in order to coerce weaker nations like us to toe the US line in world politics and trade. That is what usually makes us jittery when Democrats come to power in America, though this time it felt somewhat different. The same writer characterises the Republicans that the ‘Con artist’ leads thus: ‘The Republicans hide behind the flag and the bible to advance their vision of free market fundamentalism on behalf of the owning class. They use the politics of fear inspiring loyalty from a segment of the population threatened by globalism, multiculturalism, secularism and economic insecurity. They appeal to the victims of free trade, capital flight and the outsourcing and offshoring of jobs they say, with some justification, resulted from the policies of Democrats, despite their complicity in promoting the mobility of capital’.
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