Tag Archives: Joe Biden

Political Rants

To the rescue.

Congress approved the 1.9 trillion-dollar COVID rescue package this week, and while the final version didn’t include everything I would liked to have seen in the bill, there’s some decent stuff in there. What’s more, it is generally on a scale that approaches that of the problems we face. This is a departure, and one would hope a trend, away from the post-Reagan neoliberal consensus and towards a broader notion of what government may be called upon to accomplish on behalf of ordinary people. We have often heard pundits spin a false dichotomy between “big government liberalism” and “small government conservatism” – the fact is, conservatives and the right more generally are all in favor of big government, so long as it serves the interests of the powerful. The fact that the rescue package turns this on its head is an indication of how far we’ve come in recent years, despite all the resistance.

We’re overdue for that sort of turn, frankly. We’ve been living in the Reagan economic universe for forty years – essentially my entire adult life – with labor under siege, bloated military budgets, corporate-friendly multilateral investor rights agreements (popularly known as “free trade agreements”), and imperial swagger on the world stage. Obviously one bill is not going to change all of that, but it’s a step in the right direction, and a relatively bold one at that, compared to what we’re used to. Sure, the COBRA subsidies are kind of stupid and a massively inefficient way to extend health insurance to unemployed people. Sure, the checks should have been $2000 because that’s what everyone – including Trump – was calling for just after the election. Sure, they should have kept the $15 minimum wage because it was a solid provision that would have pegged the rate to inflation instead of giving employers a gradually increasing discount on the cost of labor. But what’s there is mostly good.

Biden and others have said that provisions in this bill will cut child poverty in half. I think that’s great, but it’s kind of like dividing the baby. If we can cut it in half, how about spending more and eliminating it entirely? So much of what’s in the legislation addresses inequality in a substantive way, but the solutions are almost all temporary ones. It’s incumbent on progressives to push the administration and Congress to build these initiatives out into more permanent benefits. We will see what kind of an effect this bill will have on families and individuals. If it’s dramatic enough, that could create the kind of popular momentum needed to push a broader agenda forward. We know what some of that will look like – the minimum wage, labor reforms, etc. We need a wealth tax, not so much to generate revenue (it will do that) but to reduce inequality and lessen the power and influence of the ultra wealthy. I’m talking about an upper limit on assets – something well south of a billion dollars. That’s the kind of tax system we need.

This could have come out much worse, and I think a lot of credit is due progressives like Bernie Sanders and some of the great people in the House. Their fingerprints are all over the more progressive pieces of this, and that’s cause for celebration.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
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.