By Eve Ottenberg
June 13, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" -
- "Counterpunch"
- First it was the minimum wage. Then
student loans. Then the $300 weekly
unemployment benefit. Then ditching the
God-awful Trump tax cuts for billionaires.
There was also the public option. Biden sure
was racking up a lot of things he wouldn’t
fight for, and guess what they all share?
They’re all things working people care about
– vitally.
Biden and the Dems may figure they can
abandon workers, because who will they turn
to? Ignominious Trump? The would-be
Republican Reich devoted to worker
destruction? Not likely. But they could stay
home during the mid-terms and, even more
devastatingly for Dems, in 2024. Then we’ll
have a one-party autocracy, as one twitter
wag put it, with giant bronze statues of
Trump everywhere. Remember: Obama’s betrayal
of tens of millions of workers to bail out
bankers ultimately gave us Trump. And that
demagogue waits in the wings. Biden’s broken
promises may just give him the opening he
needs.
Blaming Joe “I Just Don’t Give a Shit”
Manchin for Biden’s broken promises is lame.
A president like LBJ would have beaten
Manchin into shape within his first few
weeks of office. LBJ’s DNC would have
defunded the renegade senator tout de suite.
Even more pathetic is Biden hiding behind
the Senate parliamentarian. When confronted
with decisions from this person that they
didn’t like, GOP senators earlier in the
century just fired him.
Biden could have instructed his party’s
senators at least to overrule the
parliamentarian, when that nobody ruled
against including the minimum wage in the
covid relief bill. The Dems could even – oh
my goodness! – have removed her. But Biden,
like most Dems, doesn’t know how to play
hardball. That’s because he’s got one arm
tied behind his back by his Wall Street
donors. Only a few Dem senators don’t. They
are the only ones who display any guts when
it comes to looking out for the 50 to 60
percent of Americans struggling to pay their
bills, as they straggle through each week on
a dicey paycheck.
Biden may be neither as colorful nor as
proficient a liar as Trump, but he certainly
has told some whoppers. Very notable among
them was the lie that he intended to cancel
student debt. At least he had the decency to
try to weasel out of it – unlike Trump, who
would have flimflammed outright that he
never made such a promise. No, Biden
vacillated, first revising his follower’s
hopes down to maybe $50,000 worth of debt.
Next he said he’d cancel possibly $10,000
worth. But in the end, acting like the
cheapskate bagman for financial corporations
that his enemies long claimed he was, Biden
offered non-disabled student debtors who had
voted for him precisely zero dollars of
relief.
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Adding insult to injury, back in February
Biden’s justice department went “to the mat
for former secretary of education Betsy
DeVos,” as Colin Kalmbacher reported in
Law&Crime. DeVos, the Cruella DeVille of the
Trump regime, had become the target of
demands from students “ripped-off by
for-profit scam colleges.” These students
wanted a deposition from DeVos. But the
Biden justice department rushed to her aid,
alleging in their filing that the students’
“demand for a former cabinet official’s
deposition is extraordinary, unnecessary and
unsupported.” According to DOJ attorneys,
the students’ demand “is a transparent
attempt at harassment – part of a PR
campaign that has been central to [the
students’] litigation strategy…It should be
rejected and the court should quash the
subpoena.”
According to Kalmbacher, this case
involves hundreds of students defrauded by
for-profit colleges across the country. “The
students, all federal student loan borrowers
who are currently in debt, sued the U.S.
Department of Education because DeVos’s
agency was accused of serially dragging its
feet when asked to process student loan debt
cancellation requests. Multiple courts in
the Northern District of California agreed
with the students. DeVos herself ultimately
admitted that student borrowers had paid for
educational programs that were effectively
‘worthless.’”
In sum, DeVos’s department continued to
try to collect loan payments, which had been
made for these bogus programs, even in
violation of a court order. But do these
students get any sympathy from Biden’s
justice department? No. It’s instead busy
accusing the students “of being little more
than media hounds intent on harassment.”
That’s how the Biden legal wizards dismiss
fraud that injured loads of defenseless
people. Talk about kicking folks when
they’re down!
One can’t help suspecting coordination
here between Biden abandoning his promise to
cancel student debt and his DOJ attacking
those debtors with the ferocity of Doberman
Pinschers. Such suspicion is corrosive. It
makes you wonder, what next? Well, I’ll tell
you. The little that’s left of the Green New
Deal.
Anybody with a brain – and there are
plenty such in the Biden administration,
unlike Trump’s – knows that if we want a
green energy future, we cannot pursue
Trump’s disastrous policy of decoupling our
economy from China’s. It’s not only lousy
policy to crap all over your biggest trading
partner, it also sacrifices the planet to
runaway climate change. That’s because the
technology for wind and solar energy and for
electric vehicles depends on rare earth
minerals. China has 60 percent of the
world’s supply of those. The other 40
percent are in locations of dubious
accessibility. Even more eye-popping: 90
percent of the processing of those rare
earth minerals occurs where? You guessed it.
In China.
Biden got off to a decent start on the
climate. But he promptly decided to rest on
his laurels – with a vengeance. Yes, he
stopped the Keystone oil pipeline in its
tracks. Now what about other pipelines, like
DAPL and Line 3? Because fighting climate
change isn’t a half-hearted extra-curricular
activity (though you’d never know that from
the actions of most governments). And,
crucially, what about China, rare earth
minerals and the green energy revolution?
What about some foresight and careful
planning instead of insults, insinuations
and ramping up a cold war?
Ruinously, congress aggravates that war.
On June 7, the New York Times reported that
congress was, essentially, encouraging
Biden’s worst instincts on China, with a new
bill to re-industrialize the U.S., to
“protect” it from that supposedly rapacious
competitor. Biden needs no such
encouragement. But there’s no one in sight
to put the brakes on this suicidal push.
Maybe senator Chuck “Wall Street’s the Only
Street” Schumer? Not likely. In this article
he comes across as one of the
China-hysteria’s chief boosters. And the
next day, the Times reported that this
expensive, unnecessary and, despite
mendacious disclaimers, militarily
aggressive bill passed the senate. One can
only hope it dies in the House.
No doubt these crazed senatorial
Sinophobes will tout all the mythical jobs
this reindustrialization will create. But if
it’s anything like big congressional
projects since the 2008 bank bailout or
Trump’s first covid relief bill, most of the
cash will wind up in the paychecks of ceos
who’ve already bilked the government for a
fortune. We need new, green energy
businesses, not old rip-offs. One Times
headline, “Senate Poised to Pass Huge
Industrial Policy Bill to Counter China,” no
doubt warmed the hearts of Pentagon
planners, billionaire corporate bigwigs and
rabid reactionaries in the bipartisan war
party, but regardless of how these insecure
imperialists spin it, it spells doom for a
green energy future.
Biden needs the climate-change energy
transformation. He needs those millions of
jobs in the green energy sector. Because if
he’s abandoning working people when it comes
to student debt, the minimum wage, the $300
weekly unemployment and health-care, he
better darn well have something else up his
sleeve for them. That something else would
be a job in the switch to green energy. But
there’s no green energy without China. And
oopsies! Sorry guys, I started a cold war
with our chief trading partner, because the
Pentagon says we can win a hot one – well,
that just won’t cut it.