On 4/10/21, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Joe Biden was well conditioned in Capitalism long before he threw his
hat into any ring. 8 years as vice president reinforced his belief in
the System. Yes, Biden will do a far better job for the working men
and women than did Donald Trump, but at the end of the day, Joe Biden
puts the Establishment ahead of the majority of Americans.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/9/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Two Faces of Joe Biden
The press is building an image of a "radical" progressive hero, while
reality looks like the same corporate Democrat
Matt Taibbi
Apr 9
“I once caught a fish this big.” Biden after signing the American Rescue
Plan
On April Fool’s Day, CNN ran an “analysis” of Joe Biden’s presidency:
Will JRB take his place alongside FDR and LBJ?
CNN explained “JRB” had just unveiled a $2 trillion infrastructure plan
“to boost ordinary working Americans rather than the wealthy,” a program
that together with his $1.9 trillion Covid rescue doubles “as a bid to
lift
millions of Americans out of poverty.”
The news is like high school. One day, one kid comes in wearing Dior
sneakers and Nike X Ambush pants, and two days later, that’s all you see
in
the halls. The “Biden-as-FDR” stories raced around News High, with
headlines like “With nods to FDR, JFK and LBJ, Biden goes big on
infrastructure plan” (Yahoo!) and “Can Biden achieve an FDR-style
presidency? A historian sees surprising parallels” (Washington Post).
Even
the New Yorker’s naysaying take, “Is Biden Really the Second Coming of
F.D.R. and L.B.J.?” read at first glance like an affirmation.
That this high-flown language came on the heels of Biden’s people
whispering F.D.R. comparisons in the ears of reporters for weeks, and
Biden
himself calling his plan “a once-in-a-generation investment in America,”
seemed not to bother anyone. We live in a time when a president can be
said
to have “sharply cut poverty” the moment he signs a relief bill, so why
not say, as CNN editorialists Stephen Collison and Caitlin Hu did, that
this
new bill’s passage would immediately allow Biden to “lay claim to a spot
in the Democratic pantheon alongside Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon
Johnson?”
This would only be natural, they said, since “Scranton Joe” has long
despaired over the silver spoon inequities of Donald Trump’s trickle-down
economy:
The President complained as he unveiled his plan in Pittsburgh -- the
kind
of gritty blue-collar city he loves -- that the top 1% saw their wealth
rise
by $4 trillion during the pandemic while millions of Americans lost jobs.
"Just goes to show you how distorted and unfair our economy has become,"
Biden said. "Wasn't always this way. Well, it's time to change that."
Left unmentioned was that the same gritty, blue-collar president oversaw
the
TARP bailout, which resulted in a similar Trumpian windfall for the 1%.
The
richest saw their share of America’s wealth increase from 30% in 2010 to
39% in 2016. Median household net worth fell 34% from a peak in 2007 to
the
end of the Obama-Biden presidency, while banks in 2009 had the best year
they would have until 2020, that “unfair” bailout year Biden complained
about.
Pundits have long been working on revising that history. By last summer,
the
Atlantic was writing this about Biden’s management of the other bailout:
Critics on the left faulted him and Obama for not making the stimulus
package bigger (though keeping it below $1 trillion was the price of
winning
necessary Republican votes for its passage in the Senate).
That’s just not true. Certainly, Republicans would have hammered Obama
for
a stimulus of any size, but Obama officials decided on those levels on
their
own. We’ve known this since 2012, when the New Yorker published a piece
outing the fact that Larry Summers advised the incoming president to
prioritize deficit reduction over stimulus. You can read the 57-page
secret
Summers memo here.
With a partisan divide wedded to a hyper-concentrated landscape,
commercial
media companies can now sell almost any narrative they want. They can
disappear the past with relative ease, and the present can be pushed
whichever way a handful of key decision-makers thinks will sell best with
audiences.
In the case of Biden, we’ve seen in the first few months that the
upscale,
cosmopolitan target audiences of outlets like CNN, the New York Times,
and
the Washington Post want to believe they’re living through a “radical,”
“transformative” presidency, the political antidote to the Trump years.
The same crowd of West Wing power-tweeters was leading the charge against
“purity” in politics about eight minutes ago.
In fact, in the 2019-2020 primary season, Bernie Sanders was regularly
lambasted by the same blue-leaning press outlets for trying to re-imagine
F.
D.R. through programs with names like the “Green New Deal.” Proposal
after
proposal that had been directly inspired by F.D.R. was described as too
expensive, unrealistic, or a political non-starter heading into a general
election.
Now that the real version of that brand of politics has been safely
eliminated, a new PR campaign is stressing that Democrats did elect
F.D.R.
after all. Moreover, a legend is being built that crime-bill signing,
PATRIOT-Act inspiring, Iraq-war-humping Joe Biden wanted all along to be
a
radical progressive, but was held back by the intransigence of the evil
Republicans. Is that even remotely true?
Observe, for instance, the hilarious Ezra Klein editorial that just ran
in
the New York Times, called “Four Ways to Look at the Radicalism of Joe
Biden” (someone actually wrote that headline!):
Before Biden, Democratic presidents designed policy with one eye on
attracting Republican votes, or at least mollifying Republican critics.
That’s why a third of the 2009 stimulus was made up of tax cuts, why the
Affordable Care Act was built atop the Romneycare framework, why
President
Bill Clinton’s first budget included sharp spending cuts…
Over the past decade, congressional Republicans slowly but completely
disabused Democrats of these hopes. The long campaign against the
ideological compromise that was the Affordable Care Act is central here…
The result is that Obama, Biden, the key political strategists who advise
Biden and almost the entire Democratic congressional caucus simply
stopped
believing Republicans would ever vote for major Democratic bills.
Question for Ezra: did Obama also accelerate the drone program, expand
the
surveillance state, and abandon enforcement of white-collar crime to a
degree that made John Ashcroft look like Eliot Ness, in a similar effort
to
reach across the aisle? Or were those Executive Branch behaviors just
expressions of unrequited love?
Obama as a presidential candidate in 2008 contrasted himself with Hillary
Clinton by insisting he would be the guy to stop kowtowing to special
interests. On health care, he was incredibly specific: he would
green-light
drug re-importation from Canada and allow Medicare to negotiate bulk
pharmaceutical prices, insisting also he was a “proponent” of
single-payer.
Obama went so far as to do an ad blasting former Louisiana congressman
Billy
Tauzin, who went from helping write the ban on Medicare bargaining to
going
to “work for the pharmaceutical industry making two million dollars a
year” at the lobbying group PhRMA.
“Imagine that,” said Obama. “That’s an example of the same old game‐
playing in Washington. I don’t want to learn how to play the game better.
I
want to put an end to the game‐playing.”
The year after this ad ran, Obama was meeting with that same Billy Tauzin
in, ironically, the Roosevelt Room of the White House (Tauzin would end
up
visiting a dozen times). There, they hammered out a deal: Tauzin’s group,
PhRMA, would fund a $150 million ad campaign boosting Obama’s health care
program, in exchange for the Obama White House agreeing to kill the
reimportation idea and leave the ban on Medicare negotiation in place.
Tauzin later described the deal, saying it had been “blessed” by the
White
House, and emails later released showed a union official who was part of
health care bill negotiations explaining how Obama’s White House planned
on
paying for its PR campaign: “They plan to hit up the ‘bad guys’ for most
of the $.”
Obama in other words won a contentious primary against Hillary Clinton by
snowing reporters like me into hyping him as the clean hands guy who’d
push
aside Clintonian transactional politics. Then he turned around a year
later
and passed his signature program with help from the worst industry
actors,
paying for it by killing the progressive parts of the plan.
This history - important history - is now being rewritten by people like
Klein as an “ideological compromise” inspired by the Obama/Biden White
House’s misguided desire to govern with Republican votes. The fact that
the
Affordable Care Act passed with a grand total of zero such votes is
apparently irrelevant, as was Biden’s ignored and erroneous (do we only
say
“lie” in some cases?) insistence as a candidate last year that he found
“Republican votes” for “Obamacare.”
Something like Obama’s PhRMA one-two is happening again, and predictably,
it’s not getting much press. A hundred countries have formally asked the
World Trade Organization to waive intellectual property laws that only
allow
companies like Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca to make Covid-19
vaccines.
Favoring the waiver: Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and hundreds of millions
of
poor and mostly nonwhite folks in other countries who are nervous about
the
whole dying thing.
Opposing (drumroll, please): that same PhRMA lobbying group, which says
such
waivers would “undermine the global response to the pandemic, including
ongoing effort to tackle new variants.” Meaning, industry will stop
developing vaccines now, and certainly won’t develop any the next time,
if
you don’t let it cash in.
Without the ability to make generics, countries like Mexico have to be
grateful for handouts of some of the tens of millions of excess vaccine
doses we have sitting in storage. In fact, in what the New York Times
called
a “notable step into vaccine diplomacy,” Biden agreed to send 2.5 million
doses to Mexico in return for Mexico promising to increase patrols on its
southern border with Guatemala.
To recap: while waffling on patent waivers, Biden traded 2.5 million
doses
of vaccine to Mexico for a promise to crack down on the Central American
migrants who have become a pain in this administration’s public relations
tuchus. Perhaps Biden eventually will push for the patent waivers, but
for
now, does anyone even have to ask what the headlines describing that kind
of
lives-for-fewer-immigrants deal would have looked like if Trump brokered
it?
This has so much been the story of Biden’s presidency, which is certainly
less chaotic than Trump’s and does have some clearly different ambitions,
but in many ways represents continuity with both his predecessor and his
predecessor’s predecessor.
What would we have said if Trump promised to stop wall construction, then
went ahead and kept building it anyway? Candidate Biden promised not to
build “another foot of wall,” and although it is true that he’s frozen
Defense Department funding for Trump’s project, his Homeland Security
Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the decision left “room” for the
administration to “make decisions” about “areas of the wall that need
renovation and “particular projects that need to be finished.” So F.D.R.
is building more wall.
Others have made plenty of hay about the discrepancies in covering
unaccompanied child detainees now, versus a few years ago. Agencies from
the
AP to the Washington Post are using the word “challenge” instead of
“crisis” or “horror.” It’s of course only a coincidence that this is
the word Press Secretary Psaki started using back on March 18th
(correcting
the use of “crisis”).
The cries of hypocrisy about the non-use of the term “kids in cages” is,
I
think, overblown, because separating children from families was an
intentional aim of the Trump administration - remember, Trump officials
were
hoping for a lot of media coverage about separated kids, with the
specific
aim of producing a “substantial deterrent effect.” That was substantially
more deranged than any Biden policy. That doesn’t make it not ridiculous
that the Washington Post called the following structures “migrant
facilities”:
When pressed on the absurdity, the Post noted that it hadn’t necessarily
said what was happening at the border was a good thing, even quoting
activists saying it was a “huge step backward.” The Post hastened to add
that the same activist said of the Carrizo Springs, Texas facility, “I
consoled myself with the fact that it was considered the Cadillac of
[migrant child] centers.”
Again, is it hard to imagine what the response would have been if anyone,
inside or outside the Trump administration, had tried to sell us on the
idea
that immigrant kids were staying in the “Cadillac” of detention centers?
The “Cadillac cages” and “Cadillac concentration camps” jokes would have
written themselves.
The dull truth about Biden is that he’s governed, domestically, as a
slightly more progressive version of the Obama administration, with a
more
ambitious bailout, while his foreign policy is a notch or two more
hawkish
-
a wash, overall, though most of the stories about policy continuity from
Afghanistan to Iran to Ukraine and beyond, don’t get headlines.
During the recent all-consuming furor over the Major League Baseball
all-star game, for instance, news that the federal defense budget under
Biden will likely remain at the same astronomical levels they reached
under
Trump went mostly unnoticed. A few outlets that paid attention used the
common defense industry talking point that the numbers actually
represented
a cut, since the increase was smaller than the rate of inflation. Same
with
Biden’s continuation of the storied presidential tradition of punting on
withdrawal of support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine territories,
reported via headlines like, “Joe Biden is not planning to solve the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Reporters and audiences decide what they want to believe now, and get
there
together. Highlight the facts you want - “JRB” is raising the corporate
tax rate to 28 percent! Then, downplay stuff that doesn’t fit, like that
the Obama/Biden administration once proposed lowering the corporate tax
rate
from 35 to 28 percent, or that Biden is declining to raise that rate back
to
pre-Trump levels, and you can argue anything. We don’t know much about
Biden’s presidency yet, but it’s crystal clear what narrative they’d like
us to believe.
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