The Irish word ‘plámás’ means empty flattery, ingratiating talk, and disingenuous praise. With Joe Biden, you get it in droves. The seasoned US politicians had the assembled TDs in Dáil Eireann in his lap as he spoke about his great sense of Irishness. From Danny Healy Rae to Mary Lou McDonald, they lapped it up, listening like schoolboys and girls to the inspector.
But behind the plámás, there was a series of lies and dangerous untruths.
Lie Number one: Biden talked about ‘fair taxes’ on US corporations. But for decades he was the Senator from Delaware, a notorious tax haven inside the US. Today big US companies pay far less tax on their profits than workers pay on their wages. This is why Microsoft was able to send €98 billion back to the US.
Lie Number Two: Biden claimed that the US wanted to end world hunger and save starving children. Yet the US is spending $800 billion a year on its military-industrial complex. According to Oxfam if just €30 billion of that was devoted each year to the relief of hunger, it could be eliminated by 2030.
Lie Number Three: Biden says he wants to stop climate change. But he has just approved the Willow Project. This will be the largest drilling project in the US. It is sited in the remote tundra of Alaska’s northern Arctic coast and is expected to provide 600 million barrels of oil.
And here is the dangerous untruth – that the US promotes the values of democracy and peace.
The US has been involved in coups and invasions against elected governments for decades. In the 1970s, it set up the School of the Americas to train torturers throughout Latin America to extract information from left-wing activists.
Today it funds Israel to the tune of $3 billion a year even though it has been in illegal occupation of Palestine for decades. Biden has provided Saudi Arabia with arms sales to the tune of $1 billion while it is engaged in a brutal invasion of Yemen.
Democracy and freedom are not just ‘Western values’. Remember the millions who participated in the Arab Spring in 2011 to overthrow dictators which the US backed.
Moreover, democracy does not just mean a contest between millionaires for governmental office. Scandalously, half the US Senate is composed of these very millionaires.
Democracy means the ability to speak truth to power; to organise unions in multi-national firms, to have a free press not just a corporate news media; to be able to elect and re-call representatives when they break promises.
This is not the type of freedom or democracy that Joe Biden represents.
People Before Profit were the only party to boycott the Dáil charade for Biden. We stick to our words when others speak with both sides of their mouth.
