THE DEMOCRATS have taken control of the US House of Representatives in the mid-term elections, dealing a blow to President Donald Trump.
However, the Republicans won the elections to the Senate, increasing their representation from 51 to 54. This ensures Trump will still have a majority to confirm his executive and judicial appointments.
It is a stalemate, with the furious response of the urban centres and millions of youth to Trump’s anti-migrants crusade countered by support for Trump’s stockmarket and jobs boom throughout the United States as a whole. The Democratic Party spectre, that they would win both Houses and then impeach the plutocrat president, has collapsed.
A Democratic majority in the lower chamber for the first time in eight years will restrict Trump’s ability to steer his programme through Congress. It will also allow him to further inflame his supporters against the established order and their ‘blocking tactics’.
The problem for the anti-Trump movement was revealed in the election campaign when his energy was contrasted with the tired platitudes of Democratic has-beens Obama and Joe Biden, with Hillary Clinton not to be seen at all. She was kept well out of sight.
Now, opinion polls are said to show that former US Vice President Joe Biden has the most chance among potential Democratic nominees to defeat Trump in 2020.
The Reuters/Ipsos exit poll found that just 29 per cent of voters supported a Biden nomination, putting him top of the list of Democratic runners for the upcoming presidential election.
Finishing second with 22 per cent was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a one-time ‘Independent Socialist’ whose 2016 candidacy was sabotaged by the Democratic establishment in favour of former first lady, Hillary Clinton. The old discredited Democratic gang cannot defeat Trump. Trump won the presidency when trade union activist Bernie Sanders, with a powerful mass following amongst workers and youth, was forced out of the presidential race to give Hillary Clinton a clear run. Then Sanders surrendered and decided not to stand at all. Biden is part of the problem, he is not the solution.
Many US workers are aware of the Biden scandal when the then-vice-president’s son, Hunter Biden, was put on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, in April 2014, while his father Joe was put in charge of sending an anticorruption message to the completely corrupt Ukrainian government the following year.
Officials from Great Britain froze London bank accounts allegedly belonging to Burisma Holdings owner Mykola Zlochevsky, Ukraine’s former ecology minister, in 2014. The funds were unfrozen with Ukrainian prosecutors refusing to provide documents for the investigation into $23 million of alleged illicit assets.
There was no outcry about Hunter Biden’s involvement. It is still being asked in the USA, ‘Where was Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN? Where was CNN? Where was NBC at that time that Hunter Biden joined the Ukrainian oil company as a board member?’
Joe Biden is part of the problem, not part of any solution. The Democratic Party is the alternative party for the US’ bosses, bankers and super-rich.
Trump has stolen a march on the Democrats with his campaign to ‘Make America Great Again’ and his pledges to restore jobs and wages in the USA. The fact is that Trump’s stock market boom, and trade war strategy will lead to a massive share collapse and slump, greater than even the 2008 disaster that saw Detroit turned into a ghost town.
What the US workers require is not the return of the completely corrupt Democratic Party, nor its rival Republicans. The working class must break with both bourgeois parties, and the trade unions must found a Labor Party to stand in the next Presidential election.
Such a party will require the revolutionary leadership of a section of the Fourth International at its head, to go forward to deal with the crisis of capitalism by expropriating the bosses and bankers and bringing in a socialist USA. This is the real alternative to the Republicans and the Democrats.
