Hey, President Biden and Dems, It’s Time to Go Bold Again
Stand up to Netanyahu, declare a climate emergency, and start calling inflation what it really is--corporate greed.
Ready or not, the race for the White House is running full tilt.
No matter how the other Democratic contenders — Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson, and Cenk Uygur — do vying for the nomination, Joe Biden is going to get it.
That being said, Biden’s primary challengers are necessary to the conversations we need to have about the Democratic party’s current status and vision for the future. Biden’s campaign can benefit from the progressive push coming from Williamson and Uygur as it did from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in 2020, contributing to Biden’s impressive success the past three years.
Yet there are still several albatrosses around Biden’s neck.
The first is, of course, our embarrassing embrace of the Israeli government’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza, threatening to dial back Biden’s support from a percentage of the electorate on which he could previously rely.
This is a more nuanced issue than just getting Biden to utter the phrase “CEASE FIRE”. America’s relationship with the Israeli government has always been controversial because of decades of foreign policy blatantly biased toward it. No matter how complicated the issue might be, Biden’s stance regarding Israel at the macro level on exhausted American international policy, being the current occupant of the White House, makes him culpable.
While the back-door conversations are taking place, Biden needs to attempt to mollify those soured on his perceived emasculation at the hands of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu by calling for a cease fire and following the advice Sen. Bernie Sanders published this weekend in The Guardian: “The United States has to use its leverage to make Netanyahu change his approach”.
Sanders explained:
The United States must make it clear to Netanyahu that we will not provide another dollar to support his inhumane, illegal war. We must use our leverage to demand an end to the indiscriminate bombing, a humanitarian ceasefire to allow aid to flow to those who are suffering and the release of the more than 130 hostages still being held in Gaza. And we must demand that the Israeli government take steps to lay the groundwork for a two-state solution.
He concluded:
The United States must stop asking Israel to do the right thing. It’s time to start telling Israel it must do these things or it will lose our support.
Progressives like Sen. Sanders helped elevate Biden to historic success. Biden must not make the terminal mistake of dismissing their advice now as the country is facing an election where the choice will be between democracy and fascism.
The next issue concerns republicans’ favorite scare word: immigration.
Our Southern border with Mexico is not, has never been, “open.” There is no evidence of people just “walking across our border.”
Like “out-of-control crime in democrat-run cities,” “democrat policies gave us out-of-control inflation,” “gas prices are all Biden’s fault,” and anything about “Hunter Biden’s laptop,” the “open borders” lie is another cynical ploy republicans have made their stock in trade to distract information-starved Americans from how badly the wealthy and corporations are picking their pockets. It isn’t just a panic-inducing rallying cry; it’s a strategy republican politicians employ to increase presence at the Southern border during Democratic administrations. It just so happens we’re likely to hear it the most right around election time.
It’s because the republican “open borders” lie gets amplified across social media and the internet in Mexico and Central America that unassuming asylum seekers and those just taking advantage of our “free-trade” looking for work believe Democratic administrations have “opened” the border to them when they haven’t.
The fact is Democrats have a pivotal immigration deal President Biden explained would be “the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country,” including compelling the government to close the border to those crossing illegally during surges and expediting the asylum process for those fleeing crime and drugs threatening their lives in their home countries.
Back in October, Biden requested Congress fund an additional 1,300 border patrol agents, 375 immigration judges, 1,600 asylum officers, and over 100 inspection machines to help detect and stop the importation of fentanyl.
One would assume that with republicans’ hair on fire over the border, they would jump at this opportunity.
But, no.
As Conn. senator Chris Murphy explained on CNN’s “State of the Union”:
The question is whether Republicans are going to listen to Donald Trump who wants to preserve chaos at the border because he thinks that it’s a winning political issue for him or whether we are gonna pass legislation.
Murphy added the bill could be ready for the Senate floor by next week. The holdup, though, could be the very republicans clutching their pearls over “open borders,” “if Republicans decide that they want to keep this issue unsettled for political purposes”.
Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney added:
I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling. But the reality is that, that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border. And someone running for president not to try and get the problem solved, as opposed to saying, “Hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.”
President Biden — and all democratic lawmakers — need to continue hammering away at this. No matter how much the for-profit corporate media exists for the horse race and would love another Trump presidency, the Democratic party owes it to the American people to make this partisan intransigence known — even if the right-wing hate media ignores it.
The third issue is the economy.
The word “inflation” could be part of a drinking game during presidential debates.
The corporate media, though, is never going to call it out for what it is — straight-up corporate greed.
While this is no secret, there is now an official report from The Groundwork Collaborative Democratic lawmakers would be wise to cite stating corporate profits are responsible for 53% of inflation in the second and third quarters of 2023.
As reported in the Huffington Post:
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the report’s authors noted, “virtually every company in every industry faced rising costs to make products and stock shelves.” The Ukraine war also worsened energy costs and hit supply chains.
But as these production strains have eased, the report said, companies across the economy have opted against lowering prices for consumers.
Groundwork Collaborative executive director, Lindsay Owens, told MSNBC’s Ari Melber:
What we saw over and over again, listening to the earnings calls and when we looked at the macroeconomic data, is that companies were passing along their higher prices and they were going for more. I think this is profiteering.
In a December speech on supply chains, President Biden proclaimed:
Let me be clear: To any corporation that has not brought their prices back down — even as inflation has come down, even [as] supply chains have been rebuilt — it’s time to stop the price gouging.
“Inflation” is too wonky a term for most Americans, so it’s easy to fall for the “Biden’s failed economy” canard. “Greed,” however, is a word everyone understands, and Democrats need to start supplanting “inflation” with it.
Last, start listing President’s Biden’s accomplishments like a baseball score.
Just this week, the administration paused a series of plans for gas projects environmental groups have dubbed carbon “mega bombs”. This is in addition to the formation of the American Climate Corps and provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that invests about $385 billion in energy and climate change incentives that include tax credits for solar and wind energy equipment production and electric vehicles purchases. With historic $385 billion investments in tax credits for domestic clean energy production to combat climate change devastation, we are creating up to nine million new good-paying jobs and reducing carbon emissions 40% by 2030.
Urban parks and resilience for tribal communities will see significant funding, including $60 billion in new resources for environmental justice communities’ legacy pollution clean-up efforts, and rural communities will be able to take advantage of lower cost and cleaner energy sources.
The new greenhouse gas reduction fund will provide low-cost financing for clean energy projects, with at least 60% of the benefits of these investments flowing to disadvantaged communities.
For consumers, this means additional tax credits that encourage purchases of energy efficient homes, vehicles, and appliances, reducing energy costs and utility bills.
The IRA also requires companies that report more than $1 billion in profits to pay a 15% minimum corporate tax rate, and wealthy shareholders pay a 1% tax on stock buybacks.
13 million families covered under the Affordable Care Act are starting to see health insurance costs decrease by an average of $800 a year, and three million more Americans are now insured. Medicare is negotiating for more affordable pharmaceutical drugs.
The Biden administration has forgiven $39 billion in student loan debt, reunited more than 600 children separated from their families at the Southern border during the Trump administration, signed the “No Surprises Act,” and the “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America (CHIPS) and Science Act.
Democrats passed and President Biden signed into law the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act, a bill designed to expand health care and disability benefits for veterans exposed to toxic chemicals and burn pits.
They accomplished the most significant piece of gun safety legislation in 20 years with the “the Safer Communities Act”.
Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, codifying into federal law the right to same-sex and interracial marriages anywhere in the country, regardless of where the marriages were performed.
All federal employees and federal contractors must be paid at least $15 per-hour minimum wage.
Biden pardoned thousands of Americans with simple marijuana possession convictions, decriminalized marijuana at the federal level, and is replacing the nation’s lead pipe infrastructure.
He appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court.
Let’s not ignore the fact that, due to the prior administration’s negligence and malice, we unnecessarily lost over half a million of our fellow Americans to a plague, and it was the nascent Biden administration that prioritized the vaccine that returned us to a semblance of normalcy.
We are building more factories now than ever before in our history.
Unemployment is at its lowest point in over half a century.
Biden still needs to call for a climate emergency and, as mentioned earlier, needs to show Israel who is boss.
It’s time to GO BOLD.
That’s how we win.
This November, we vote for more robust democracy — or fascism.