A Progressive Punch-List
With a Biden administration now all but assured, the real work needs to begin
(Joe Biden, L, and Clarence Thomas)
“With Joe and Kamala at the helm…You’re not going to have to argue about them every day. It just won’t be so exhausting.” – Barack Obama, October 21, 2020
Now that it appears Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will win enough votes in the electoral college when the election happens in just over a month on December 14, liberal leaders want us to go back to sleep. They’ve already told us as much.
If their destructive records weren’t enough reason to stay on alert, surely this flaccid call for rest and relaxation from them is. Whenever the most powerful people on earth tell us to take it easy and not worry – whether it’s Donald Trump talking about Covid-19 or, say, Barack Obama saying that the United States does not torture, or that our economy will be best served by the hands of the people who destroyed it – our ears should perk up and our fists clench.
If Donald Trump leaves or is removed from the office of the Presidency – an objective necessary good, in and of itself – there will still be no shortage of things we need to demand from a new Democratic administration that has signaled in every way they are not interested in giving to us. Progressives must be ready to fight a President Biden once he is in office, especially since so many of them insisted they would if only the rest of us would go along with voting for him.
I’ll take those supposedly reluctant Biden voters at their word, then. “We will be with you fighting Biden to do what’s right on Day One!” I heard in some form or another from seemingly countless people imploring us to vote for Biden even though he actively opposed most things we and they supposedly stand for, in order to get Trump out.
Well, good, because Day One was a few days ago, and there’s plenty to demand from the incoming Biden administration. In no particular order, here is a far from comprehensive punch-list for Progressives who don’t just want to simply relax and enjoy brunch without thinking about Donald Trump, but who also care about the deeper issues that preceded and will outlast him.
It’s time to fight…
For the type of Universal Healthcare that Biden has opposed his entire career, and which he said this year that he’d veto if it were passed by Congress, so that we – the most wealthy nation in the world’s history - may join the rest of the industrialized world.
It’s time to fight for a Federal Jobs Program, the type of which helped us get out of the last economic depression that was as bad as the one we’re currently in. Democrats and Republicans alike had no issue giving away the largest upward transfer of wealth to mostly large corporations as so-called Covid-19 relief, but unlike other major nations like Germany we did not put any conditions on that corporate welfare that mandated said companies would not lay-off workers. So, whereas places like Germany saw an increase in unemployment of just about a single percentage point during the pandemic thus far, about 50 million Americans have lost their jobs. It’s a bit too late now to maintain that employer/employee relationship with conditioned corporate welfare and government-subsidized salaries, since we failed to do it earlier in the year, but it isn’t too late for our representatives to step-in directly and have the government employ people in need. It helped us during The Great Depression, and it would help us again.
It’s time to fight for Tuition-Free University Education for all residents. In decades past, public colleges and universities were already very nearly tuition-free for students. As our nation’s wealth has grown, we can do that again. It’s the morally right thing to do, and it will also help our economy in the long-run by not saddling students with unpayable debt, and better outfitting them to make wages that will allow them to spend and drive our consumer economy. Beyond that, more education for all people, regardless of what work they go into afterwards, has the potential to enlighten us and make us better stewards of this supposed democracy that we have.
It’s time to fight for Debt Forgiveness. After keeping American wages effectively frozen for decades, our consumer-economy was at risk of seizing up. So, faced with this paradox peculiar to capitalism where unending growth is demanded but workers are paid less and less, Americans were encouraged to trap themselves in a matrix of indebtedness just to survive. Houses and cars got too expensive to buy with cash, colleges costs rose, while wages stayed the same and job security was weakened. The solution was credit cards, a host of pay-day lending, mortgages, car leases and loans, and college loans. Now, individuals are more indebted, with frozen wages and rising living costs…with a pandemic that has already cut about 50 million jobs in an economy with a workforce of just about 160 million in total.
If Democrats and Republicans are to help the economy that is so precious to their corporate bosses, something has to give, because people don’t have much more money to spend or an ability to get much more credit to keep it going on our own, anymore.
It’s time to fight against the Biden administration’s Planned Austerity. People in and close to the Biden campaign have signaled for months that, contrary to the vague promises that they would be comparable to an FDR administration that expanded our social safety net, they will in fact institute a severe austerity program that will take from families at the worst possible time. Of course, this would be in line with Biden’s congressional record of militantly attempting to cut programs like Social Security, as well as he and other Democrat’s successful gutting of our welfare system in the 90’s, which overwhelmingly affected children.
We need more for our money and services right now, but Biden has given clear signals it plans to take more from and give back less to families and workers. If we don’t fight that, nothing much else will matter.
It’s time to fight against Family Separation and Deportations. Leave Trump’s rhetoric aside and the record is clear – the Obama/Biden administration was as cruel to migrant and refugee families at our Southern Border as any presidential administration in modern history. They deported more people than any other administration ever had or has since. Like Trump, Obama and Biden also kidnapped children, placed them in cages, and separated families. We weren’t paying enough attention to them when they did it the first time, and we’re damned to hell if we make that same mistake again.
It’s time to fight the Expanding Militarized Police State. Plain and simple, Joe Biden has promised to increase funding to police departments at a time when their systemic criminality and racism is on more full display than ever before. That’s a bold statement and we need to take him at his word that he’s committed to supporting these repressive arms of our internal colonies.
Biden is one of the main authors and proponents of our modern carceral system, which has been accurately described as The New Jim Crow, and which has devastated and often literally enslaved generations of Brown, Black, and poor families. This is who he is, and he’s not backing down without a fight.
The Obama/Biden administration dramatically increased the militarization of our local police forces, outfitting them with the weapons of occupation and empire that we use on our victims abroad and turning them to marginalized communities here within our borders. It’s no coincidence that the Black Lives Matter movement sprang up during Obama/Biden. We need to join them in continuing to recognize that, when it comes to our repressive and racist criminal justice system, that treats people differently at every stage from surveillance to stops, to arrests, charges, sentencing, and execution based on race, both parties support it, and there is no single politician who has been demonstrably worse and more to blame than Joe Biden. If Biden is to be better on Criminal Justice, suddenly, at the end of his life, it will only be because we make him.
We need to fight the Expansion of our Surveillance State. We are the most surveilled population in the history of the planet. No authoritarian regime of the 20th century has anything on us. This creeping drip of privacy violation quickly turned to a torrent thanks to people like Joe Biden, who to this day brags about how the dystopian Patriot Act was modeled on his proposed legislation.
Now, complete surveillance is the norm. Private companies and governments work together to ensure that we are listened to and watched, and that our movements are tracked at every moment of our lives. The results, from criminal persecution to monetizing our private lives, are never benign, and it needs to be stopped.
We are moving backwards, now, by installing one of our surveillance state’s key architects into the White House, and unless we fight him with everything we’ve got, he’ll continue taking us in the wrong direction here, with unfathomable consequences.
We need to fight to stop American Torture. Contrary to the lies of Presidents like Obama and George W. Bush, the United States of America tortures. A lot.
We torture people of other supposedly sovereign countries. We torture our own citizens.
The systemic programs of torture are bipartisan and those who commit the torture are promoted through the ranks instead of removed and prosecuted. This will continue under Joe Biden unless we prevent it.
We need to fight against American Assassination programs. In addition to torturing, we assassinate, a lot.
Our illegal and reprehensible assassination programs were increased in scope and scale under the Obama/Biden administration, and even the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders support these atrocities, when they’re committed by Presidents of the right party. Democratic administrations have illegally assassinated as much as any Republican one, and the last time we had one they even began openly assassinating American citizens.
President Biden will continue to do this unless we stop him.
We need to fight to end all Illegal American Wars. The United States currently occupies dozens of countries with troops, and is in the process of adding to the over 1 million innocent Iraqi people we’ve murdered through our hot war with them, to say nothing of the many more we’ve killed with our sanctions.
The Biden administration has signaled that it will continue current antagonism with China and Russia, the former perhaps a bit more concerning than the latter because they actually have an economy capable of competing with ours, and Biden has been instrumental in waging every US war of the past half-century. The Democratic Party and Joe Biden are warmongers.
Sorry.
If you want to stop our immoral and illegal wars, electing Democrats won’t do it. You have to fight Democrats in power just like you do Republicans if you want to stop the United States from being the number one purveyor of terror on earth.
We have to fight to End U.S. Coups. Democrats are great at pretending they’re a less warring party, and one of the ways they do that is by facilitating violent and undemocratic coups all across the world, especially in Central and South America and the Caribbean.
There has never been a Democratic Presidential Administration that hasn’t worked on behalf of banks and corporations to illegally overthrow democratically-elected governments of other nations and install despots that will do our bidding and repress their own people. Unless we believe that this incoming administration will magically become the first such one, despite absolutely no promises to that end and the fact that Biden took part in multiple coups as a part of the Obama administration, then we need to fight them.
We need to fight against Awful Bi-partisan Tax Policies. President George W. Bush and his Republican Congress gave us what was at the time a historically inequitable tax policy with cuts for the rich that plunged us into deficits and further debt while tearing away at an already meager social safety net for regular Americans. President Barack Obama and his Democratic congressional counterparts made that cruel tax-cut permanent. Donald Trump outdid them all with his so-called covid-19 relief bill which represented the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history, and which was signed off on by congressional democrats.
It doesn’t matter who is President – they will continue to rob us and give to their rich benefactors unless we stop them.
We need to fight for Bank and Financial Institution Regulation. Our unstable capitalist economic system needs socialism to bail it out, on average, every four to seven years.
Every so often, however, things get really bad and combinations of deregulation of banking and financial institutions by the politicians who they pay, and the predictable ensuing rapacious tactics lead to all-out crashes. We’ve already had three crashes in the first 20 years of this century.
The last time a Democrat was in the Oval Office, he inherited a crashed economy, and his solution was to leave the same people in power (who were on effective leave from their jobs at the institutions who destroyed the economy with their greed) who facilitated the crash. Before that, President Clinton was instrumental in the early and mid-90’s in deregulating banks and financial institutions to make possible the irresponsible and immoral services and technologies that led to our housing crisis.
Democratic Presidents have historically been just as bad as Republican ones at regulating banks and financial institutions, because they are just as beholden to them personally. So, if we want banking and financial regulation to improve, and we should, we need to fight this incoming administration to make it happen.
We need to fight to Address Climate Catastrophe. When it comes down to it, Joe Biden’s platform simply does not do what climate scientists say is the bare-minimum to avoid the end of organized human life on earth.
Even after The New Green Deal was watered down, Biden refused to support it, and instead loudly campaigned on the inspiring message that he would not end the poisonous and literal earth-quake-causing practice of fracking. The Obama/Biden administration destroyed previously protected arctic wildlife refuges to drill for oil and our carbon emissions increased during their eight years in office.
Electing Democrats alone does not help the environment in any way. We need to fight them in order to force them to do what the science calls far, because Democrats and Republicans alike have made it clear that they are more interested in making their polluting corporate donors happy than saving the planet.
We need to fight Joe Biden to Demand Better Justices. We’ll leave out all-important federal circuit judge appointments and the ways the Democrats and the Obama/Biden administration failed justice and all of us, setting President Trump up to make an historic amount of lifetime appointments that are sure to damage the nation for generations. Let’s instead focus briefly on The Supreme Court.
I’ll keep it simple – Joe Biden took it upon himself to usher through committee two of the most reactionary Justices in the Court’s history – Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia – and he now says he has no problem with Amy Coney Barrett taking her place on the Court.
That is to say that Joe Biden has helped onto the Supreme Court Judges we could have expected him to considering that he’s spent all of his career guzzling corporate cash and most of his life opposing women’s healthcare and gay rights. Joe Biden will not suddenly become better at evaluating Justices unless we force him to.
I would've ranked climate higher, but this list is excellent!!