Biden’s “New Deal” is now just The Same Old Song and Dance
It only took 6 months for Biden’s “transformative” agenda to start looking a lot like Barack Obama’s “Hope and change.” Suddenly all those “radical” things that were promised if we’d just “vote like our lives depended upon it” are either disappearing into the vapor of Democratic Party political expediency or being whittled away in “negotiations” with a political party of which the majority believes or at least professes to believe that Trump won the election. While MSNBC/NPR liberals and Biden himself will blame Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, much of Biden’s wilting agenda has little to do with their attention-seeking obstruction.
What it does have to with is a pattern of Democratic Party bait-and-switch corporatism that has been well-established over the past 40 years. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama campaigned on a sundry variety of progressive ideals, yet once they got in office they legislated as Nixonian Republicans. Clinton signed NAFTA which caused irreparable damage to organized labor and Mexican agriculture, Biden’s “Tough on Crime” bill put millions of black fathers in jail for drug offenses, and the Graham-Leach-Bliley act did away with vital regulations of the banking industry and led to the 2008 financial collapse. Obama promised to revise NAFTA to restore labor rights, yet spent much of his presidency pushing the TPP, a legislation that would have reduced worker safety around the globe and allowed transnational corporations to sue countries for regulations which negatively impacted their profits. He hawked his “Afforable” Care Act with the promise of a public option, but took it off the table the first day of negotiations. Campaigning on an expansion of Social Security, which he never even tried to negotiate, Obama instead put Social Security cuts on the table as a bargaining chip with Republicans. He gave powerful speeches about immigration reform and the humane treatment of refugees, then built cages for refugee children from Central America, promoted a strategy of deterrence whose cornerstone was sending the children back to their respective countries and almost certain death, and stood by while ICE imparted thousands of human and civil rights violations upon immigrants.
So it is no surprise that a Democratic Party with the same leadership and sponsorship would promise one thing during the campaign and and enact another after they were elected. Their lipservice to and lukewarm support for progressive legislative proposals are a cornerstone of party tradition, one enabled by a Democratic Party media that willfully ignores their party’s reversals and omissions, excusing failure to enact any semblance of a progressive agenda as the fault of the other party, centrists within the party (even if over half the party is comprised of centrists), or as a response to an “unrealistic” or not sufficiently “bipartisan” aspiration. Democrats are more concerned that the Confederate Party will go on Fox News and accuse them of a deficiency of bipartisanship than taking the urgent action necessary to alleviate hunger and homelessness. Biden absolved himself of his leadership void publicly on June 1st, answering critics by pointing to “two [Democratic] members of the Senate who “vote more with my Republican friends.” And while it is true that Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema vote against Democrats more than any other party members, they still vote with Democrats 70% of the time. Biden can’t even get his excuses right, although I’m sure Rachel Maddow fans find his errant public shaming of Manchin and Sinema inspiring.
If one eschews the paralyzing “both sidesism” that corporate media substitutes for journalism, it becomes clear that bipartisanship in practice means compromise with a treasonous political party that will literally do anything to defend white supremacy and foment the violence that maintains it. So when this political party openly admits, as it did the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, that it is going to obstruct every single thing you want to do, one has to wonder how many times the Democratic Party is going to let Lucy pull the football away at the last moment. It’s either donor-induced madness or a nostalgic flight of fancy for President Biden to even contemplate bipartisanship and for a media with any integrity to frame bipartisan compromise as something laudable. Why continue the charade of bipartisanship by moving the goalpost further and further into the distance waiting to see if Republicans will compromise? We have already been compromised into tens of millions without access to health care, over 600,000 homeless (and growing), 14 percent living in poverty (including 10 million children), the highest prison population per capita in the entire world (10% higher than El Salvador), and pointless perpetual wars for profit that we have never won and into our aiding and abetting “allies” in the starvation and mass murder of black and brown people in the Middle East and across the globe. And that‘s only the tip of the melting iceberg.
Biden promised student loan debt forgiveness, but after he was elected changed that to conditional forgiveness of $10,000 in debt for a subset of students that qualify, and now to no student loan debt forgiveness at all. He proclaims at the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that “The Federal Government must reckon with and acknowledge the role that it has played in stripping wealth and opportunity from Black communities," then announces he is setting aside $10 billion in the American Family Plan for black community development. That unimaginative and paltry offering hardly reflects his graphic and “earnest” speech about the damage done by systemic racism. We spend $80 billion on incarceration and $100 billion on policing every year largely thanks to Biden himself. If you’re really acknowledging the role the federal government has played, and you really want to change that dynamic, $10 billion is an insult. Instead you would be doing something about the fact that we spend nearly twenty times that much to keep black people incarcerated and segregated. Biden misrepresented Medicare for All as too costly, promising a public option and Medicare expansion, but now only $50 billion in subsidies to the health insurance industry through the Affordable Care Act remain. Four months ago Biden promised to end the Obama administration’s military aid to Saudi Arabia for their genocide of the people of Yemen, claiming he would stop offering “offensive” weapons aid while promising “to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people.” One guess as to if anything has changed regarding our assistance in the starving and maiming of poor children in Yemen.
But it is not only the predictable neoliberal fakery and half-measures that doom the Biden administration to failure. It’s that Biden continues to be the exponent of forces greater than him, and has absolutely no interest in fighting those forces to begin the transformational change that will save us from our current socioeconomic and political carnage. While some may think he is doing things because progressives/humanists are pressuring him, he is going only as far as the consultants and donors are allowing him to. He is once again merely saying the words we want to hear while he announces legislation obviously influenced by Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, then compromises with Republicans to less than half of his original proposal, eliminating the parts of the bill that would have made the greatest impact on poverty and the working poor. His Establishment roots will indeed allow him propose trillions in economic stimulus which ultimately trickles up to the donor class, but as to the public policy changes needed to reverse the tide of police violence against black and brown (and poor) Americans, his answer is only to increase funding for the police and to improve training and recruitment, which is as Establishment and non-transformational as it gets. If spending money on policing were the answer, we should certainly be the safest, least violent country in the world. We’ve been increasing police and military budgets for over 50 years, the outcome being a steady stream of videos on social media showing police disdain and dehumanization for those they are chartered to protect, an increase in mass shootings and persistent violence in the same areas that have been purposefully neglected for decades. Biden’s Pavlovian “respect for law enforcement” makes him unable to see the degree of carnage and white supremacy police impart on a daily basis. He recites speeches about racial justice, but in the same breath never fails to admonish the “rioting and looting” and “violence” that historically has been the sole motivator in forcing white people in power to legislate change. He has been a subdued proponent of policies like a $15 minimum wage, yet like every other progressive policy the support is practically a secret. If you want to see someone who actually supports a $15 minimum wage and acts like it, check out Bernie Sanders.
In fact, Bernie Sanders is the anti-Biden, using every bit of his influence to spread the gospel of humanity and sound public policy that will end the division and violence that our political parties and our media foment. If Sanders were president there would be no doubt about what he wanted, and in lieu of the milktoast teleprompter rhetoric spouted by Biden , every day we would be hearing specific policy ideas and a vision that would expose corporate media and the corrupted political system it is enmeshed with. The focus would be on the advantages of Medicare For All, student debt forgiveness, free public college, and taxing multi-millionaires and billionaires to help pay for it. The self-promotional rhetoric about getting back to “normal” in time for outdoor meat grilling and a return to “freedom for Americans” this summer would be supplanted by the need to boldly address our country’s original sins (Native American genocide and slavery) to achieve the “unity” Democrats and the media mistake for bipartisanship. And I would wager that the McCarthyism and Sinophobia promoted by the Democratic Party would take a back seat to more pressing issues.
As Biden whittles down his infrastructure program down to roads and bridges and reverses course on economic relief for millions of Americans, I wish I could just change the channel from this rerun of Obama’s tenure. But Biden has a long history of supporting white supremacy and American imperialism, so to expect anything different than banal platitudes, hyperbolic laundry lists and ill-timed jokes would be unrealistic. The tragedy is that Republicans and Democrats alike are misled into believing that Biden is some sort of socialist or that he is the second coming of FDR respectively. And while conservatives trade on inconsequential anecdotes like “Thanks to Biden America is paying the highest gas prices since 2014” (it’s financial speculation and increased demand that’s largely to blame) to fuel their misdirected spite, “liberals” are fed a steady stream of Biden adulation from MSBC, CNN and NPR, leaving them numb to his rank inadequacy for the moment and the evolving neoliberal horror show he is currently overseeing.
At some point we are going to have to face the reality that “better than Trump” presidents like Biden are primarily going to help those who don’t need it and ultimately lead to someone as bad or worse than Trump. History has shown that one step forward and one step back presidential administrations result in a waxing and waning of our ills, but no solution to them. If the Democrats and Biden are unwilling and/or unable to simply stand up for what is right, they will have to reckon with a loss of the majority and a fading grassroots support from the millions seeking leadership whose goal is to eliminate the damage neoliberalism has done and not just reduce and sequester it from an uninformed base. This is not the time for a president who merely speaks the words they would have them say, reflexive Establishment tropes that reinforce militarism and violence like “Israel has a right to defend itself” as an excuse for occupation and oppression or “there are a few bad apples” as a distraction for the deeply rooted systemic issues in American policing. And this is certainly not the time for the constant drumbeat of “we’re in competition with China to win the 21st century,” when most economists agree the notion that we are in competition with any one country is a misnomer and the same administration that claims it is trying to stop an escalation in hate crimes against Asians places the demonization of China as one of its top priorities.
Yes, some Americans will be better off under Biden than under Trump. Yes, Biden can pull off the “opposite of Trump” nice guy performance balladry, even if sometimes like Perry Como it sounds as if Biden might doze off in mid-verse (or we might dose off listening to him). But ultimately Biden is following a failed globalist template, one that straddles the untenable line of utilizing the government as an exponent of good while keeping his promise to the ruling class that “nothing will fundamentally change” for them. Enabled by a media that presents the issues as inflammatory and biased panel discussions among political party surrogates, toxic politicians like Rahm Emanuel and Rick Santorum, thinktank ideologues, corporate lobbyists and multi-millionaire celebrity anchors, or as a “one side says this BUT the other side says that” obfuscation of the truth, Biden will continue the anti-Trump brow beating by condemning the misinformation that is threatening our democracy while actively taking part in it.
As the hope for transformational change once again sinks into the deep pockets of corporate America, and we once again witness the floundering of a party that will stand up loudly against the bad but timidly in favor of the good (and then only when pushed), we can only hope the voices of progressive leadership can somehow be heard above the static of counterproductive interparty crossfire and dueling accusations of hypocrisy. As Republicans get their whip and do their thing and Democrats run around the ring, it’s the Democrat’s same old song and dance that is allowing them to do so. And if you haven’t noticed, it’s the same old song and dance that is killing us softly with its song.
