Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Enter The Blob.

As anyone who listens to my podcast, Strange Sound, knows, I’ve had serious differences with the Biden team on foreign policy from early on in their campaign. What first gave me pause was the fact that the “issues” section of their campaign web site included no foreign policy items whatsoever, except one or two bank-shot mentions of other countries in the context of discussions about domestic policy issues, like immigration and energy policy. Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as Donald Rumsfeld once told us, and in this context the cliche is true – while Biden’s outward-facing platform was a blank slate on foreign policy, there was definitely a there there, even if we couldn’t see it. And, no great surprise, the Biden foreign policy is basically built around the return of the blob (a.k.a. the imperial foreign policy establishment that has dominated administrations of both major parties since the American empire began).

We saw evidence of this in stark relief this past week with the bombing of “Iranian-backed” elements in Syria. Immediately we saw mainstream commentators like Richard Haas on television describing this as a measured and appropriate response to what they described as Iranian provocations, parroting the administration line that the U.S. needed to do this to show the Iranians that they can’t do whatever they want in the region without consequences. (That privilege we reserve to ourselves, of course – hence the raid.) The Biden administration is taking the path of least resistance, returning to the settled imperial order of confronting Iran at every opportunity, imposing conditions on them unilaterally, and not taking responsibility for our own disastrous policy decisions over the past four years (which, themselves, compounded the disastrous policy decisions of the preceding 75 years).

The fact is, the Biden administration is building on that bad policy. While Anthony Blinken has not openly endorsed Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, he is leading the State Department in returning to something that still looks a lot like that recognition, while keeping the American embassy in Jerusalem – a decision that cements in place this open defiance of the very concept of a two-state solution. The Biden State Department is still calling Juan Guaido the “interim president” of Venezuela when he is, in fact, no such thing and has no standing as the leader of that country – a delusional policy originated by the Trump crew. Biden is unlikely to withdraw U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, a criminal quid-pro-quo over recognition of Israel, brokered by the Trump administration. Don’t even get me started on Saudi Arabia. In fact, as far as I can see, the only policy Biden appears poised to reverse is Trump’s opening to North Korea – literally the only good thing the man ever did (albeit by accident).

With respect to foreign affairs, war and peace, we appear to be locked into place, regardless of which major party runs the White House. Bad news for anyone who might have hoped this presidential transition would bring a saner approach to the world. Doesn’t seem likely.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Same old.

It’s late February, nearly a year after the first cases of COVID-19 in the United States, and I and millions of people like me are still standing in the middle of a street, waiting for a truck to strike us down. For those of you who thought everything would change after we got rid of Trump and saw Biden take office, this is not an encouraging time. I know we’re little more than a month into the new administration, but for chrissake, the house is on fire … pull the damn alarm. They’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better than this, because this is pathetic. I’m hearing voices within the administration telling us that they’re ramping up production of everything COVID-related via executive order. That’s nice, but where’s the evidence of this? I live in a fairly rural community (a small city), and I notice no change whatsoever, aside from the rhetoric.

Yes, like many Americans, I have not had a COVID vaccine, as I am not yet eligible. I am not over 65 nor do I work in what’s considered a high-risk capacity. But the eligibility barrier is just another way of saying that they just don’t have enough shots. At this point, they should be flooding the zone with vaccines, trying to get as many shots as possible into people. I have heard whispers that they will be expanding eligibility to people in their mid fifties, but there’s no official statement regarding that on the CDC site, New York’s COVID page, nor my local Health Department’s site. And so we wait in this Kafkaesque way until someone tells us its our turn, but that day still seems pretty far off. And it’s not like I can shelter in place into perpetuity – I have to work, and that involves leaving my house on a daily basis (albeit not for the entire day); I have to go to the market from time to time, of course; I have medical appointments that can’t be done virtually. In short, I need the goddamn shot.

I hate to say it, but this is the same pathetic small-bore type of response to enormous problems that we saw in the Obama administration. We need a national mobilization on the scale of the Second World War, quite frankly, as we have lost many more Americans than died on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific in the 1940s, but I have zero confidence that Biden and his administration have the bottle to follow through with anything of the sort. After forty years of right-wing assault against the very notion of government actively intervening on behalf of ordinary people, we are left with this dysfunctional husk of a federal bureaucracy, straining like a 100-year-old geezer as it attempts to squeeze out a COVID response package that’s months late and about 600 dollars short, per capita.

Let’s prove me wrong on this. Call your senators, your rep, your new President and Vice-President. Tell them to push harder to get this vaccination program moving – July is not nearly soon enough to get shots in everyone’s arms. Let’s do it like our lives depend on it, because they just might.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

No shortcut.

There’s been a lot of push back from the left this week on the Biden Town Hall, and with good reason. While he presents as an affable old grandpa, his conception of policy is locked into the 1990s in a lot of ways. When he thinks he’s leaning to the left, he means the “left” of three decades ago – the liberal cohort that thinks in terms of community policing, mild reforms, drug rehabilitation programs, etc. Whereas even the mainstream Democratic party has moved on from many of these centrist notions of change, the leftward movement appears to have escaped the notice of President Biden. For the time being, he is riding on a wave of relief that Donald Trump is no longer (a) President, (b) in our faces every single day, or (c) on Twitter. I’m sure millions of people are happy that the current president is not ordering an angry racist mob into the Capitol building. But that, while necessary, is of course far from sufficient.

His position on student debt illustrates this insufficiency to a tee. Biden keeps confusing, probably deliberately, the temporary suspension of interest payments (which he has ordered) with elimination of interest on student debt (which he has not ordered). He vaguely promises $10K in debt relief, but both he and his spokesperson keep suggesting that this is something Congress should take up. To be clear, he has the authority to do this himself. And if he can do $10K, he can do more. But Biden seems to think that there’s a fairness issue involved here. He tends to couch it in terms of not wanting rich people to get the benefit, which brings us back to Biden’s (and most centrist Democrats’) preference for “targeted” programs. In other words, we need a new, overly complicated, dedicated administrative infrastructure to achieve the recapture of funds that our already-existing tax system could accomplish with very little adjustment.

Of course, this problem is more about us than it is about Biden. We’ve got Biden as president – and lackluster officeholders all the way down the line – because we didn’t organize enough people and ultimately bring them around to supporting progressive, even radical, change. In a very real sense, we get the politicians we deserve, and we shouldn’t expect better if we’re not doing the hard, long-term work of building change from below. Organizing is about more than electing people, obviously, but one of the by-products of successful organizing is a better grade of politician. I think we’ve seen that in some of the more progressive Congressional candidates, like Rashida Talib, Cory Bush, AOC, and others. I’m pleasantly surprised when candidates of their stripe are successful, largely because I know that in my own area of the country very little organizing is taking place – that’s why we now have the return of our erstwhile Republican Congressmember, Claudia Tenney, who beat out Anthony Brindisi by a mere 109 votes. Brindisi was part of the “problem-solver” conference and there were few Democratic members farther to the right, but in the end it wasn’t enough.

You see, a little more organizing would have given us those 110 votes to return a centrist to Congress. And a lot more organizing might have resulted in sending an actual progressive to Congress, to say nothing of actual mutual aid benefits for the people in our district. So, what are we waiting for?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.