Joe Biden’s Treacherous War on Workers
A ‘Progressive President’ Sides with Bosses and Prays Inflation Goes Away
Presidents foisted upon the country from the Democratic party since the 1990s morphed into a second conservative party or neoliberalism, which is fueling the U.S.’s regressive and ugly turn.
Because of Democratic Party mendacity the U.S. suffers two parties devoted to chambers of commerce from coast to coast.
The Republican Party has changed too. For example, you will not find a Bob Dole or even a warmongering George W. Bush in the party today. No, the Republican Party is far more than a slave to ruthless capitalism, it is the party of the white supremacist and Christian nation lunatic. The combination of white supremacy and evangelical Christianity is noxious but it has been left unchecked for decades upon decades.
But the Democratic Party, which excels at stagecraft and using progressive language, aided and abetted the nation’s white supremacist/Christian nut crowd in killing off social safety net programs and fueling law-and-order fanaticism. In an interview with Jacobin, Lily Geismer says Democrats like Bill Clinton “actively undermined” social safety net programs, such as cash to low-income families.
The Democratic Party of the 1990s not only ravaged the federal social safety net, it urged states to do the same to their feeble community programs, and ramped up the Party’s conservative lurch by pushing anti-labor policies, and pumping more money and weapons into police departments all over the nation.
President Bill Clinton, a grandfather of neoliberalism, also loved incarcerating people, especially Black people, and helped kick-start the love of prisons among Democrats. Clinton’s wife, Hillary, a former Goldwater Republican, also got in on the action calling Black youth “super predators” and championing prison-building. Later as a U.S. senator and Secretary of State during President Obama’s first term, Hillary would prove a champion of the U.S. military and war. She also ran a rotten presidential campaign, leading to Donald Trump’s tawdry reign.
Should any person paying attention then be stunned that President Joe Biden, renominated a mega wealthy Republican to remain as the Federal Reserve Chair, and is also supporting attacks against a resurgent labor movement in the U.S., thanks ironically in part to 2020 pandemic federal laws that helped workers stay and gain in the labor market, including zero interest rates on borrowing money for hiring more workers or increasing long-stagnant wages.
The Federal Reserve, the U.S. Central Bank, is tasked by Congress with regulating flow of money in efforts to achieve equal and full employment — so it can be pro-worker if its Board wants to.
But with the Biden administration’s rush to normalcy, the Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, first appointed by Donald Trump, has raised interest rates at least three times and is threatening another hike.
As The Lever puts it:
The way interest rates impact wages is based on a number of contingent factors, but the main theory is that raising the cost of borrowing money discourages businesses from making investments, which leads them to slow hiring or even lay off workers. If workers have fewer options for jobs, they are more likely to accept lower wage work and less likely to form unions.
Workers in the U.S. aren’t the only ones who will suffer from Powell’s policy. Rate hikes by the Fed and other central banks around the world are already contributing to debt crises in developing countries, leaving more people to die of hunger in places like Yemen and Sri Lanka.
Instead of this anti-worker stance, The Lever notes the federal government has progressive options:
There’s no question that the federal government needs to deliver some type of relief.
Inflation is outpacing wage growth for most workers, meaning that “real wages” are actually declining. Not everyone experiences the same level of inflation, based on their expenses, but today’s price increases appear to be hitting low-income people the hardest.
But federal lawmakers could forge an alternate path to combating inflation. They could, for instance, make wealthy people pay the price of inflation — such as by raising the corporate tax rate, which Republicans slashed by 40 percent in 2017, or instituting a capital gains tax.
The great difficulty in progressive, pro-worker policy is getting it past a U.S. Senate with the likes of centrists Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both senators say taxes on the super wealthy to fight inflation will not happen while they are in power.
So neoliberal and remarkably old President Joe Biden has an out on this one, blaming do-nothing senators in his own Party. The thing is, Biden doesn’t want a pass on this fight, for like his former boss, President Barack Obama, Biden has been a significant player in the neoliberalism movement. There are no big steppers among neoliberals regardless of claims to the otherwise from Neera Tanden, John Podesta, or The New York Times editorial board.
Instead of challenging and confronting Manchin and Sinema, Biden succumbs to them, while the DNC works to put more centrists or neoliberal diehards in power.
That is a big part of Biden’s problem, he’s never been a progressive of any sort.
During his years in the U.S. Senate he made friends with white supremacists like Sens. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) and Robert Byrd (D-Wv.) and joined the Clintons in funneling money and weapons to cop departments nationwide and supported building tons of prisons for mass incarcerating Black people of all ages.
Biden, however, doesn’t need voters right now and might not in two years either if Trump were to seek reelection. Unless of course Biden administration policies and inaction keep inflation alive and send the nation reeling into another recession.
