Ask what your country can do for you…

Ask what your country can do for you… 

 

In more normal political times, Biden’s record during his first 100 days in office wouldn’t have inspired comparisons to FDR. But in the wake of Trump’s malignant incompetence, Biden’s success in returning government to something like functionality seems, to his supporters at least, almost worthy of Mount Rushmore.

 

-      Geoffrey Kabaservice: Consensus still eludes Biden, The Guardian 

 

By JM Hamilton (5-1-2021)

 

Biden’s first hundred days came and went this week, and it provided an opportunity to reflect.

 

The fact that Biden doesn’t behave like Trump, and is competent, is a breath of fresh air to many.  But to say that Biden isn’t Trump is very low bar by which to judge the Biden White House.  Biden’s actions, to date, from executive orders reversing Trump’s orders, to the passage of $1.9 trillion in stimulus, were largely expected. In fact, the $1400 checks were the bare minimum (essentially a band-aid for a bottom half of society that has long been neglected & abused by Washington elites and US corporations), especially with tens of millions of Americans jobless, given up looking for work, or subject to wage slavery. 

 

Perhaps the biggest surprise, so far, is that Biden appears to have stood up to the Deep State (aka the Pentagon & the MIC) and announced that the United States was finally pulling out of Afghanistan, much to America’s collective relief.  Otherwise, a great deal of what President Biden has done, in the first hundred days, is preservation of a failed status quo.  

 

There has been no New Deal type legislation that has addressed, and reformed, the massive structural defects of the US economy and political system. For several generations now, Americans have been beaten down and told not to expect much from their government.  Austerity has reigned supreme for the average American… while trillions in plutocratic welfare, tax breaks for the wealthy - and the capture of government by oligarchy - has grown ever more ruinous for the nation, its economy, and social cohesion.  Seemingly, lost in America’s rearview mirror are the creation of a middle class, the defeat of national socialism in Europe, and the development of programs like Social Security.  

 

Of course, FDR is the President who addressed the failed status quo, who took on the structural defects of the capitalist economy… by building a social safety net, creating government jobs, when the economy was on its back and subject to an exceptionally nasty Wall St crash.  FDR paved the way to demonstrate that America could be dynamic, and that government had a key role to play in the economy and ameliorating capitalism’s very worst attributes.  But above all, FDR showed that the structural defects that threated the future of the United States could, and must, be addressed. 

 

 

 

POTUS Biden’s speech this week was remarkable, if for no other reason than he announced that trickle-down was a failure.  But in announcing that the cornerstone of forty years of American economic policy was wrong, Biden also owes it to Americans to address the deep void left by republican party’s – as well as establishment dems’ - failed dogma.  And just as the neoliberal house of cards has fallen (brought low by the pandemic and bailed out yet again, by the American taxpayer), nothing short of structural solutions will take care of the problems before us. Fourteen hundred dollar band-aids won’t stop the hemorrhaging for nearly half of all Americans. 

 

What structural defects am I writing of?  For starters, let’s go with a campaign promise Biden ran on… a living wage for all Americans. How Congress cannot pass an increase in the minimum wage -- and continue to subsidize billionaire & multinational profits with taxpayer dollars, essentially keeping labor alive -- enters into the theatre of the absurd. There’s also the structural defect of America’s monopoly economy, where TBTF (too big to fail) monopolies and cartels privatize gains, while socializing losses.  

 

America’s monopoly problem was on full display this week when Big Pharma threw a fit over the possibility that Washington might share publicly funded patents with the rest of the world, so as to eliminate the existential threat that is the global pandemic.  Here on full display was a microcosm, Big Pharma, of a disease that threatens the entire US economy: that is to say, monopoly and monopsony.  Such irony, the biggest threat to Western economies and the dynamism of capitalism isn’t communism, but rather, rent seeking utilities spawned by the private sector.  Here, for all the world to see, is an intransigent, self-serving, and entitled American crony capitalism - in the form of Big Pharma.  A Big Pharma industry that is nothing more than a rapacious and venal middleman, sponging off taxpayer funded research for its very existence. 

 

And yet, not a word from the Biden Administration on serious antitrust enforcement. 

 

The US government has many, many structural defects, but perhaps none are as debilitating, or provides such low hanging fruit for reform, as the senate's filibuster. The senate is where all good legislation goes to die, and where a crony status quo is preserved.  We are about to find out very quickly if Biden is serious about the variety of programs, he pitched this week.  Key to getting Biden’s progressive agenda through will be the elimination of the filibuster, ending the charade of bipartisanship with a racist & insurrectionist GOP, and the administration’s ability to rein in & control bitterly partisan right-wing democrats (see Manchin, Sinema, Et Al.). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the end of the day, America’s structural defects go back to an entirely corrupt congress, and oligarchs and multinationals, who have rigged the entire system in their favor.  Exceptional wage and wealth inequality, as well as the pandemic, have exposed the dry rot and decay of the US economy and the government.  It is this void, this vacuum, that must be addressed not with $1400 band-aids, but with meaningful structural reforms, both economic & political. 

 

Not that long ago, a former president – in his inaugural address – exhorted ordinary Americans to sacrifice for their country:  

 

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

 

For decades, ordinary American gave and gave… while the wealthy and the powerful stole and took. Now, to save our democracy and the United States, it’s time for ordinary Americans to ask, what their country can do for them? 

 

And it’s time for the government – with or without the assistance of the wealthy - to deliver for the American people, big time.

 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2021