Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Biden Administration Page 1 of 2

The Weird Pro-Biden Messaging

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On January 17, 2024

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Democrats, Democrats never change.

It’s all, “well yes, Biden is bad, especially that *cough* Gaza thing, but, ummm, Trump will be worse. So hold that nose, crawl up to the cesspit and vote Biden.”

I mean, I’ve always been anti-lesser evil, but is there any line?

We’re talking a full blown genocide, with deliberate starvation of the population. Only one working hospital remains in Gaza and it is under attack as I write this. If you want to, and you have a strong stomach, you can find such fun videos as a father who is a doctor amputating his own daughter’s leg, on his kitchen table, without anaesthetic. (There is no anaesthetic left in Gaza, all surgery is without anaesthic. Welcome to Hell.) Babies died abandoned in incubators and Palestinians running to get food from aid trucks are gunned down by quad-copter drones.

Israel couldn’t do this without the US, which has been in constant bomb and missile airlift mode since it started. Further, the only person who could stop the genocide with a single phone call is Joe Biden.

But sure, vote for him because Trump would be worse. Vote for a genocider.

There will be some commenters, I bet, who say, “but Trump would be worse: he’d support the genocide and do other bad things.”

Possibly true.

“Vote Beelzebub, he is 3% less bad than Satan.”

Let’s explain basic politics in a democracy (the same rules apply in non-democracies, with slight adjustments.)

You have power if you can deliver voters, volunteers or money in sufficient quantities to make a difference, and no one can get those voters, volunteers or dollars without going thru you.

That is it, that is all. If you want to have influence on policy, you must have enough voters/money/volunteers who will only make that difference if they get what they want and who will absolutely work against you if they don’t. Doesn’t matter if it’s single payer or “don’t genocide”. If enough people won’t say “you don’t get what you want from me if I don’t get what I want from you” then you have no power. None.

The right has power because they will absolutely vote against and work against people who cross them and are loyal to those who do what they want. Say what you want about Trump and the right: he gave them the abortion ban they’ve been wanting for generations. He did that. They got what they wanted from him, the single most important thing they wanted.

“Progressives”? No principles. They believe in nothing. There is no red line they will not cross, no slight or betrayal they will not forgive if it is wrapped in a smarmy right wing Democrat’s lying lips.

Fortunately, in this case, there are lot of Muslims in Michigan, a battleground state. And apparently there is a red line for them, “you killed my relatives!!!!!” So there’s a good chance Biden will lose, even if the usual suspects whine that he’s better than Trump, even if he did everything he could to make a genocide happen.

But until there is a voting/giving/volunteering bloc with actual principles which aren’t garbage and which they can’t be cajoled out of with empty promises and lies and “but he’s even worse!”, no one’s getting a better country or world, for that matter.

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The Debt Ceiling Crisis Is Just Politics

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On May 24, 2023

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So, let’s state what should be obvious.

  1. Republican Presidents since Reagan have all increased the deficit more than Democratic ones.
  2. Republicans have always raised the debt ceiling when Republican presidents are in charge; therefore,
  3. The “debt ceiling crisis” is just partisan politics and has nothing to do with the deficit
  4. Republicans and many Democrats want spending cuts which affect ordinary people, rather than repealing tax cuts or, say, cutting the “defense” budget.
  5. Biden’s record is that he likes the idea of cutting things like social security; so…
  6. A lot of Biden’s “resistance” is Kabuki
  7. The constitutional argument is unclear, but as a practical matter, the Supreme Court cannot enforce a decision which says the debt ceiling is constitutional.
  8. So, ultimately, whether the President decides to obey the debt limit is entirely a political decision, he can easily say that based on the constitution he has no right to do so-he must pay all obligations.
  9. If Biden does ignore a Supreme Court decision it will increase the disintegration of the current political order and set a precedent.

I would note that the idea that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of constitutional issues was not clear to the founders, and is something the court arrogated to themselves. It is not clear that they should have that power.

As for the rest, Biden will do what he wants to do.

 

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Commentary on Biden’s Speech

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On April 29, 2021

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Biden’s turning out better than I expected on domestic economic issues, though that isn’t a high bar. This speech (full transcript) is very interesting, though the question of how much he can get through Congress remains. My telegraphic thoughts on reading it.

The IMF predicting six percent growth isn’t that impressive, just because after Covid there was always going to be a boom.

Getting rid of all lead pipes is really good and has needed to be done for decades.

Getting high-speed internet to every home is good. Hope there’s some price controls in there, because the ISPs definitely rip people off (I’ve seen profit numbers as high as 97 percent.) They also need to be sure it actually gets built; money has been given to providers to build before, and they haven’t bothered.

Upgrading the power grid is absolutely necessary. We’ll see what the details are. It needs to be done in a way that forces proper maintainance. PG&E has let literally thousands of fires happen because they’d rather pay dividends than fix their infrastructure.

The green plan is pretty good. Insufficient, but better than anyone else has done. Half a million charge stations, more energy efficient buildings, planting over crops and some industrial policy to create green machinery in the US. Someone has finally got it through their thick skull that most of the jobs required in upgrading buildings and so on can’t be offshored and outsourced, something I and others have been arguing for decades. Happy about this.

Some stuff about $15/minimum. Doubt Manchin will let it through, but if I were Biden, I’d use it as a cudgel for 2022 to get a majority he can use. Really, even $15 is stupid. It should be about $22 and indexed, ideally to the increase in CEO compensation.

A lot more money for research. Excellent.

Universal pre-school. I think it’s a terrible idea, but I know most experts disagree. Have to take the kids from the parents and soon as possible and train them to be obedient workers.

Two years of free community college; give workers slightly better, but non-elite jobs.

Some ACA fixes, none of which will make it good or people not hate it, because insurance companies controlling what you can get and whether it gets paid for is always going to suck.

Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. See if Congress lets it through, but a good thing.

Top bracket for those earning 400K or more up to 39.6 percent. No way Machin lets this through, but a good market for a start. It should be 90 percent, of course.

The fixes to capital gains are great, and something America (and most other countries) have needed for ages. Taxing capital gains less than income was always ridiculous and unfair.

Lots of red meat rhetoric against CEOs and execs. Nice.

China cold war still on: China must play by American rules, and the US military will stay in the East. (More on this in future pieces, this is important.)

Red meat on Russia. Self congratulation on Afghanistan (earned, but continuing drone bombing it is bad.)

Gun control talk: wants the loopholes closed and background checks on everyone (I doubt this can get past Congress. If it does, the Supremes will veto it.)

Immigration: don’t blame me, I sent a bill and Congress won’t pass it. Also we should help nations where we’re getting a lot of refugees from so they don’t need to flee to  us.

Call back to FDR. They clearly want to make Biden the next FDR. He ain’t that, but domestically he’s the start of the end of neoliberalism, perhaps, and if so, that’s enough and more than I expected. None of this stuff is exactly radical, or sufficient BUT it is a reversal of trend, and that matters.

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The Logic Of Bootlickers Is The Logic Of Too Many Americans

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On January 21, 2021

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This is sweet and lovely in the purity of its boot-licking authoritarianism:

The account then goes on to insult those who do not worship at the Biden altar.

The authoritarian personality is simple: it slurps up; kicks down. You know the type. You’ve seen them wherever you’ve worked, and you loathe them.

What is true is that Biden, Harris and Pelosi people are good at politics. They are good at seeking and getting political office.

But this is a category error; a profoundly stupid and harmful one.

First, this says nothing about their intelligence. Trump became President, is he smarter than you? (Or, if you’re dumb, smarter than many philosophers, scientists and so on who never earn any political office?)

What about George Bush Jr. smarter than you?

These people are good at getting political office, that doesn’t mean they are good at anything else. Pelosi is good at raising money and intra-caucus politics, but the House Democrats haven’t had a great electoral record while lead by her. She also passed almost all of Trump’s bills, including terrible ones like massive tax cuts and so on. She has renewed the Patriot Act multiple times. She refused to reign in George Bush when she got a majority in 2006.

She may be a good politician, but so what?

Harris did terribly in the primaries. She attacked Joe Biden as a segregationist (he was) and earned the VP slot, as best I can tell, by a campaign of backstabbing all the other possible candidates. She helped keep people known to be innocent in prison when a prosecutor.

Biden, in addition to being a segregationist, was one of the main Democratic boosters of the Iraq war. He was a driving force behind the bankruptcy bill which made it impossible to to discharge student debt. The Patriot Act was based on a bill he tried to pass in the 90s. He threatened Cuba with devastation if they dared give Snowden asylum. He’s apparently a great boss and a loving family man, but he’s filth. He’s also a known plagiarist.

Being able to get political power implies nothing more than an ability to get political power. Becoming rich implies nothing more than an ability to become rich.

Being good at A does not mean you are good at B to Z.

It certainly doesn’t mean your getting political power or money is good for anyone else. In most cases, the rise of most billionaires has been bad for other people. They have made money because they found a way to impoverish other people. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are exceptions.

Grow some self-respect and a spine. Your leaders are only better than you in one sense: they are better predators than you are.

“Oh, I so admire the wolf,” simpered the sheep.

In fact, much of why you aren’t them is because you have morals. You aren’t willing to lock up people who know are innocent, like Kamala. You aren’t willing to destroy a foreign country and kill a million people like Biden. You wouldn’t go along with Trump’s massive tax cuts like Pelosi.

You have some ethics; some morality. You wouldn’t run a huge scheme to defraud millions of people and/or steal their homes like almost everyone senior on Wall Street. There are limits on the evil you are willing to do for money or power, and that means, in America, you can’t have either.

Whenever someone who has ethics gets anywhere near power, (Corbyn or Sanders) everything possible is done to destroy them. The media lied over 75% about Corbyn. Every single candidate dropped out in a period of a day to deny Sanders the Democratic nomination; an effort coordinated by Obama (who may well be smarter than you, and whose evil was carefully concealed behind his smiling sociopathy.)

The elites have spent the last 50 or so years driving 97% of Americans into the dirt, and rewarding themselves with billions. They are predators, and nothing else. You are the sheep, and the cops and military are the sheepdogs: still animals, and discarded the moment they aren’t useful. (Check those military veteran homeless stats.)

Biden, Harris and Pelosi (who cares about Carville?) aren’t smarter than you, odds are, and unless you’re Stalin reborn, they’re worse people than you in every way except their ability to get and hold power and use it against the American people and foreigners.

Hopefully they’ll be less evil rulers than Trump (though note, he didn’t start any new wars), but that’s not a bar.

Have some self respect. Your system elects not the best of you, but the worst.

Thinking the worst are the best: that’s the problem. They’ve indoctrinated you like farm animals “they feed us, and I’m sure the beating are because they love us, and I’m sure when they loaded Thelma and Fred and George on the truck last week and they never came back, well they were taking them to a better place.”

Except you don’t even get that good a deal, since they’re happy to see you starve and don’t try and heal you when you’re sick.

Grow up.

These people feed on you, and that’s all you are to them.

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50 State Protests Fizzle + Biden

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On January 20, 2021

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The plan was to have right wing protests at all 50 states. I thought that would likely happen, but it has fizzled: almost no one showed up.

I’m not sure if this is due to the disruption of the communication system between right wing activists, or if their will has been broken.

The fizzling is good news. I still see the conditions for a right wing insurrection, but I’d love to be wrong and I’m happy to be wrong about the 50 state protests.

Just as important, perhaps this will convince Biden and Democrats not to do a Patriot Act II: because whether the right has it in them or not, left-wing demonstrations do continue.

As for Biden, he’s stopping the Keystone XL pipeline (the right thing to do, which I say as a Canadian, and Trudeau was a fool to throw good money after bad on it.) Biden is also due to rejoin the Paris agreement. The Paris agreement has always been bullshit, no major nation has come even close to meeting its agreed goals, but Biden does seem serious about the environment, so we can hope for some improvements in US policy.

He’s also, apparently, going to get rid of the border wall, though that’s more show than meaningful. (Plenty of miles of border wall was built before Trump.)

The original optimism on anti-trust has faded, given Biden’s appointments.

As for Trump, it appears he’s going to be made an example of by being driven into real bankruptcy. The bank securing his loans has said they will no longer do business with him. He embarrassed his fellow elites, then he tried for an extremely incompetent coup and made them feel scared. They won’t forgive him for this. As with Martin Skrelli, you can hurt the hoi polloi all you want, but there’s a certain style required.

The next four years, I am quite sure, will be very unpleasant, and not particularly better than the last four years. Biden will be worse for many foreign nations than Trump was (and better for a few, like Iran.)

In the meantime, congratulation to the winner, and to Harris, who won nothing but whose machinations carried her next to the Presidency and who stands a good chance of being President, even before 2024.

Update: The NYTimes has a list of Biden’s first executive actions.

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You Can Always Get Half the Population To Hate The Other Half

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On January 15, 2021

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So, there was a lot of violence, relatively speaking, during the Trump administration, though most of it was cops beating BLM protestors. (Generally violence erupted after police started it, though there were exceptions.)

There is going to be more during the Biden presidency, because Republicans don’t believe that Biden won legitimately. These numbers seem to be around 70% or so. Meanwhile Biden is unlikely to fix the economy, though hopefully he will get Covid get under control (an effort which will be hampered by the incompetence and stupidity of Governors, including many Democratic ones like Cuomo,)

My voice is small, the heyday of the blogs is done, but I will gently suggest that “cooling it” might be wise over the next few months. The fact is that the election wasn’t stolen. If it was, I would say so. You simply cannot get to the votes Trump needs with fraud allegations. The worst things the Dems did were actually voter suppression of third parties (keeping them off the ballots with specious bullshit), but Republicans routinely engage in totally egregious voter suppression of their own.

Biden is not going to be a bad President for Red America. He’s bending over backwards to try and appease Republicans. A lot of Democrats think this is a mistake, but this is how it is.

America is strongly polarized. Terribly so. Stories of family members turning in relatives for the Capitol storming are routine.

This is BAD. When you get to the point of families narcing each other out, you’re in a really bad place nationally.

Both sides are convinced that they are in the right. Republicans are, yes, wrong, but we live in media bubbles. I saw a stat that after Fox called the election for Biden it then continued calling the election in doubt hundreds of times. West coast elite techies came down on the side of Democrats, which is going to pay some awful dividends even if it was the right decision (because this has made them a partisan branch of government making decisions that should be made democratically. Places like Faccebook, YouTube and Twitter are Commons, and that they are privately owned does not change that fact.)

If you don’t want this to spiral out of control, find a way to cool it. I am one of the few blogs left who is read by both sides, even though I’m a left winger.

The people who are responsible for this are the people who have spent 40-50 years dividing America. Fox and conservative talk radio started it, places like MSNBC continued it by creating partisan media for centrists (there is no left wing media of significance, Jacobin and WSWS don’t cut it.). Matt Taibbi’s summary of how this happened is essential reading.

Right and center and left have been divided into tribes by the masters. The simple fact is that there is only one enemy, and that is the oligarchy. Everyone who isn’t in the top three to four percent is oppressed by them. They have used culture war to divide. The elites who supported Trump don’t want regular people to be better off: they’re willing to give them anti-abortion policies, sure, but they don’t genuinely want to pay them more or give them more rights.

The same is true of the elites who support centrists: the “Resistance”. Silicon Valley regularly engages in activities meant to suppress wages (the late, sainted, Steve Jobs put together an agreement they wouldn’t hire each other’s engineers, for example.)

Almost no members of the oligarchy support the left: BLM and Antifa have little actual support. They get some nods, but note that Democratic Mayors and Governors, with few exceptions, still let the cops crack down on them terribly and Biden’s response was “we should give the cops more money.”

If the people who stormed the capitol had been successful in overturning the election, it would just have been a victory for one set of nasty elites over another set of nasty elites.

The actual problem in America is people aren’t sharing a reality any more. This isn’t just isolated to Republicans; they’re wrong about the election, yes, but Liberals (centrists) have been terribly propagandized too. Remember the BS story about how Russia was paying bounties for the Taliban to kill American soldiers. It was obvious BS, at the time, and still treated seriously. There have been many such stories floated in the Liberal press, keeping Liberals in a frothing rage at Russia and Trump for the entire Presidency; insanely angry and unable to think even as Democrats voted for almost all of Trump’s bad bills and Democratic governors like Cuomo fucked up the Covid response terribly.

Killing each other; hating each other, at the behest of oligarchical factions is insane. Doing a coup based on lies (as opposed to a revolution based on truth) is insane and self-destructive.

You have an enemy. It is only your fellow Americans because they have been lied to for 40 years. This doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous to you now, of course, but remember the cries of the Capitol protestors; their anger,  when they realized that most of the cops were still willing to fight them.

The cops work for the oligarchy. The red-teamers thought the cops were on their side. Oh, they’re more sympathetic, yes, but they work for the Man.

Divide and keep conquered is the oldest playbook in the hands of ruling classes. America has been riven by it and may be destroyed by it.

Look past the hatred (often well deserved) and see the enemy: the one that manipulated you into hating each other so you wouldn’t go after them. The one who stole $26K in wage increases from you over the last two generations.

Someone’s pulling your strings, and you’re dancing like puppets.

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Trump Election Protestors Storm Capital to “Save Democracy”

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On January 6, 2021

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Well, well. I don’t usually write about breaking news, but this seems important. Trump supporters have broken in, shots have been fired, at least one person is on the way to hospital with a gunshot wound. Lawmakers have been told to get ready for the use of tear gas.

Before the protests, Trump had said:

“This election was stolen from you, from me, from the country.”

He also urged his supporters to head to the Capitol, adding: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness.”

But now he’s called in the National Guard and told his supporters to stand down. They’re going to feel betrayed.

I want to note that what these people did is a reasonable response to believing an election has been stolen. That’s what Trump has been telling them. He’s wrong, though delusional enough to probably believe it, but if the election had been clearly stolen– and yet about to be certified, storming the Capitol to maintain democratic norms would be the right thing to do.

Ultimately, Trump is both delusional and gutless. Having called on his supporters to do this, he now abandons them; even turns the National Guard on them.

Propaganda has consequences. When you lie to people and they believe you, they then act on those beliefs.

I will note, as have many others, that these people were being treated, overall, with kid gloves. This rather makes the point:

It looks like that may be about to change. Even Republican Congress members are now scared and outraged. The “white militia” exemption from serious law enforcement may be about to go away. If it does, that’s interesting. If it doesn’t, that too is interesting.

Either way, I suspect we’re about to get a “stolen election and President who stabbed Patriots in the back” narrative, and a LOT of Republicans will believe it.

As with rhetoric about how abortion is murder, and how widespread abortion is mass murder, IF you believe it’s happening, well, violence would be justified. Expect the militia movement to get even nastier.

Very bad omen for Biden’s administration.

Update (Trump Statement):

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Plus c’est la même chose

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On December 31, 2020

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***MANDOS POST MANDOS POST MANDOS POST****

Jeremiads notwithstanding, it appears that Biden’s strategy of appealing to Trump-disgusted suburban voters worked. At the US presidential level, at least, left-populists and Sanders supporters proved to be essentially irrelevant, politically. The Democratic consultant class has had its biases confirmed. What is, haha, left to the left-wing populist is to double down on the jeremiads: to predict that in the future, the inevitable failure of now-successful beige neoliberal centrism to reinstate its heavenly mandate in the USA will result, down the road, in the election of a smart fascist/right-populist Man On Horseback, if we’re lucky, merely a Viktor Orbán figure or suchlike for the American context — or worse, possibly much worse.

This reasoning seems very plausible to me. Because it is true that unless the neoliberal establishment has a change of heart, Bidenist/Obamaist US leadership will not be able to turn the ship around from an on-going trajectory of national and global decline. And insofar as that decline is felt in shrinking living standards, and insofar as “beige centrism” manages to suppress left-wing alternatives, the population will likely turn to forceful/violent right-wing populism, and all the inherent divide-and-conquer grifts that right-wing populism brings with it alongside the nationalist emotional highs and the “sugar rush.” As I said, it seems very plausible.

One of the bad habits of neoliberal intellectualism is an excessive reliance on “counter-intuitive” explanations as exemplified by the once-popular book Freakonomics.   We should be rightly suspicious of narratives that tell us that things we view in common-sense terms as bad are actually good. Sometimes counter-intuitive explanations like that are valid, but only sometimes. But we should not fall into the reverse trap and always uncritically accept simpler explanations that happen to match our moral intuitions. A common left-wing moral intuition is what I explained above: A people increasingly deprived of access to the good life and unable to access progressive responses to that deprivation will eventually provide reactionary forces a breakthrough. It has, after all, happened before.

It is the implied determinism that we should view with at least a little bit of suspicion. First of all, although we should heed history’s warning signs, history actually does not truly repeat reliably, and context matters. Trump’s senility and incompetence was, in point of fact, part of the Trump political brand. It was the riposte to a failing elite in a time when elite “competence-signalling” was part of the elite self-image. The specific trajectory to the “competent Trump” is much harder to fathom, when the incompetence was specifically a part of what he was and still is lionized for by his most ardent followers.

If we leave aside the typical and easy materialist determinism that thrives particularly on the more left end of the spectrum and accept a little bit of “counter-intuitive” reasoning, a different picture emerges. One in which the success and failure of Trump was highly dependent on circumstances over and above material discontent, circumstances that are difficult to line up again.  Circumstances in which the very competence of the future feared competent fascistoid is one of the features that prevents his (or her) rise, just to give a possibility. One in which the bad memory of Trump is sufficiently mobilizing for a long enough period of time that the mainstream neoliberal centre is protected from attempts at overcoming it.

In that world, between every election, things just keep getting worse and worse. And yet, the process of coalition building in a complex society given the American political system simply throws up Biden after Biden, Democrat or Republican. Decline centrism, unending. Like Tyler Durden’s vision in Fight Club, with people drying meat on the asphalt of a ruined highway, except they’re still arguing over whether they should choose the chieftain with the red trim or the blue trim as head chieftain, out of fear that one of them might reduce the incentives created by the fear of winter freezing by their proposed “peltfare” program.

Imagine this future: the soft, dirty sole of a comfortable white Reebok runner gently stroking a human cheek — forever.

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