A TRANSFORMATIVE PRESIDENT

 

Will Joe Biden turn out to the most transformational president since Ronald Reagan?  In just a hundred days he has passed a stimulus predicted to cut child poverty in half, proposed an infrastructure plan designed to both fight climate change and create jobs, and proposed another plan that will increase government spending on child care, including universal pre kindergarten for all children over three. It also  will raise taxes on the rich (and beef up spending on the IRS to go after tax cheats, who are usually rich) to help pay for them.   It seems hard to believe that a long time moderate Democrat who's supported things like the war on drugs in the past is pushing for the largest expansion in government spending on the American people to reduce poverty since Lyndon Johnson in the nineteen sixties (or even Franklin Roosevelt in the nineteen thirties). Is it because the Democratic party has drifted leftward in the past few years?  Or is it just that Biden sees the country's emergence from the pandemic as a chance to push through progressive changes while government spending is suddenly popular?  Probably some of both.  Certainly reporting of the fact that the salaries of that nation's top CEOs have continued to skyrocket during the pandemic has perhaps made the average American more acutely aware of the inequities of our society.

While the future of the infrastructure and childcare bills aren't set (once again, thank Senator Joe Manchin and his love of the filibuster), some version of them should pass in the near future.  All economic indicators indicate that they will create a shift in wealth from the rich to the poor, that, in my opinion, has been a long time coming.

Really, this kind of spending goes to the core of what's wrong with the American brand of free market capitalism: the problem is that the pay you get for your work is not based on the quality or importance of it, but the pure raw dollar value you bring to an employer.  While this works just fine in many jobs (if you're a trained lawyer than you can make a lot of money for a law firm, so they pay you a lot), its when it comes to jobs that are hard to assign a simple dollar value to that things get tricky.  Take daycare workers for example; we all know that they have an important and essential job and perform a service that many parents rely on, and yet, because daycare centers can only charge the parents so much, they can only afford to pay their workers so much.  Meaning that most daycare workers are paid little more than the minimum wage, causing many daycares to struggle to keep a consistent level of care because many of their workers leave for better paying jobs.  Having a  universal government  pre k program that provides decent pay for the workers without charging the parents is really the only solution to this problem.

Quite a  bit has been written about how the Biden spending plan will help to bridge the enormous economic racial gap that exists in American society (and already some Republicans have started griping about so called "reparations"), and while I think that's a good thing, it also should be pointed out just how this will benefit American women.  Along with the most recent plan's call for universal childcare, the infrastructure plan calls for spending on better pay for eldercare workers; these two jobs are overwhelmingly held by women, and have been systematically devalued because of that.  Paying women more for the important work they do is sure to have a positive effect on the country. And having daycare paid for by the government would be an  economic windfall for working mothers. It would be a great benefit all around.  A lot of positive attention has gone to the fact that, for the first time ever, the president gave a state of the union address flanked by a female vice president and speaker of the house; while symbols like that are nice, passing a bill that would improve the lives of millions of women in this country would be even better.

The nice thing about social spending is that once is starts, it becomes popular and people get used to it.  In the nineteen thirties conservatives opposed Social Security, in the sixties they did the same for Medicare.  Now those two programs are so popular that politicians often talk of expanding them.  If both of Biden's tax and spending packages pass, I imagine the same thing will happen.  Honestly, I'm surprised it has taken this long.

A GOOD START

 

Beginning in two thousand and two, the city of New York implemented a crime fighting program known as "stop and frisk" in which the police were allowed, without probable cause, to stop, question and possibly search criminal suspects on the street. Within a few years, hundreds of thousands of people were being stopped by the program each year.  Inevitably, the program proved controversial, with its "guilty until proven innocent" attitude being used disproportionately against men of color.  The program began to lose popularity when lawsuits began to filed against the police department, and since twenty fourteen, the number of people stopped under the program dwindled to around a little over ten thousand.  Now that the harassment of  people walking down the street has been curtailed, can we start using the same principal for people driving too? 

Recently, as the emotional Eric Chauvin trial continued, there were two recent incidents of violence committed by police officers on men of color that started with cars being pulled over.  The first happened in Minnesota, when twenty year old  Daunte Wright was shot and killed by a twenty six year veteran officer who claimed that she was reaching for her taser gun and accidentally pulled her pistol instead.  Wright had been pulled over for hanging an air freshener on his rear view mirror.  The second incident was less tragic but still shocking; in Virginia Caron Nazario, an off duty member of the military, was pulled over, harassed and pepper sprayed because  the police wrongly thought that his car's license was expired.

The tragically routine nature of these two incidents just highlight the absurdity of having armed law enforcement officers pull over cars for minor infractions.  Why do we have the police wasting their time and the taxpayers dollars going after people who are not endangering the lives of others?  Many intersections have cameras, and when people make a wrong turn or run a red light, they take a picture of the car and send them a ticket in the mail.  Police and parking attendants  have cameras, so why don't they do the same thing?  Sure, if a person is driving recklessly or appears to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol, then it's fine for the police to pull that person over, given that they are a danger to themselves or others.  (And even in that case the police should film the reckless driving to prove the need to pull the driver over).  But for running a stop sign when there's no pedestrians around?  For failing to signal soon enough?  It's an overreach for the people who are supposed to protect and serve the public.

Since two thousand and fifteen, the Stanford Open Policing Project has sifted through the data of over two hundred million police stops, and their findings are far from surprising:  African Americans are more likely to pulled over than white people across the country.  And after the pull over is made, they are also more likely to be searched, and, of course, more likely to have force used against them.   Speaking for myself as a white man, I have been stopped for running stop signs four times in my life, and I was never asked to get out of my car or verbally harassed in anyway.   Compare that to Philando Castile, an  African American man who was shot and killed during a routine pull over in twenty sixteen; in his thirteen years of driving he had been pulled over forty nine times.

America has the highest prison population in the world  (and the highest per capita), and thirty eight percent of that population are African American, despite them making only thirteen percent of the population.  The inherently racist nature of our legal system in this country is, of course, not just the fault of the police themselves.  It has a long sad history, from feed slaves being jailed on trumped up charges and then forced into prison labor, to the unfair enforcement and sentencing laws of the war on drugs, to the privatization of prisons in the nineteen eighties, which gave us corporate for profit prisons that lobbied congress for tougher sentencing laws.  Obviously, reforms of not just the police department are needed in the future to make America a more just society.  But one simple place to start is to stop having the police pull over someone because they have a air freshener on their rear view mirror.  There's no excuse for it.  

MANCHIN ALMIGHTY

 

Although Donald Trump lost the twenty twenty election, his loss was less than the polls predicted.  And his loss did not hurt down ballot Republicans, who gained seats in the house and did better than expected in the Senate.  In fact, after election day it looked like the Democrats wouldn't take the Senate at all, with two   runoff election victories in Georgia needed.  It seemed like a tall order, but they did it.  While part of that is thanks to the great work that Democratic voting rights activist Stacy Abrams did in that state, another factor was that Trump himself was sending a mixed message to his supporters in Georgia; simultaneously saying that the vote against him there was rigged, but that Republicans should still get out and vote in the runoff.  This confusion did the party no favors in those runoffs, and is a perfect example of the chaos that our former president has unleashed on both the country and his party.

In any event, the Democrats now have both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but the Senate is split down the middle with only Vice President Kamala Harris there to break ties.  One of the fifty Democrats is Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who is probably the most conservative Democrat in the Senate and a thorn in the side of democracy.  It is currently possible for the Senate to get rid of the filibuster rule that mandates sixty votes for any bill to get passed, and allow bills to pass with a simple majority, but only if all Democrats vote to remove it.  And Manchin wants to keep it.  At one point he did consider making filibusters more difficult by supporting a talking filibuster (currently all a Senator has to do is announce they want to use it), but recently he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post stating  there is“no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.”  To be fair to Manchin, I understand that he is a tough position, somehow he has remained in office for over ten years as a Democrat in a very red state that Trump won with almost seventy percent of the vote in the last election.  And his desire for bipartisanship sounds niee on the surface.  But the modern Republican party is not one for compromise as we saw so clearly during the Barack Obama years.   Under  Obama, the Republican's use of the filibuster skyrocketed.  The Republican Senators tried to put a hold on his judicial appointments and successfully blocked  one of his Supreme Court nominees from even getting a hearing in the Senate ten months before the twenty sixteen election.  Years later the same Republicans  shoved  Trump's nominee Amy Coney Barrett  onto the court just a month before the  twenty twenty election. And there are still Republican members of congress who won't publicly  admit that Joe Biden won the election legitimately.  Do you really think that they want to work with him?  There may be a rebel or two (Mitt Romney?) but  ten Republican Senators  will be needed to override a filibuster, and that will never happen to any significant bill pushed by the Democrats.

Really, Manchin's editorial couldn't have come at a worse time for the Democrats.   In the wake of their twenty twenty loss, the Republican party has decided to double down on voter suppression, targeted at African American voters.  Although they claim that this is because so many Americans are "concerned" about voter fraud after the twenty twenty election,  they don't mention that that concern comes from Donald Trump continually lying about his loss.  A more honest reason for these laws was given by Michael A. Carvin arguing in the Supreme Court on March second when he defended a voter restriction law in Arizona by stating  that overturning the law “puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats." Republican legislators in Iowa and Georgia have already passed such laws, with Texas, Arizona and Florida ready to join in.  In response, a bill that expands the right to vote on a national level has been written by Democrats in the Senate.  It's a sweeping endorsement of the right to vote, and, as it now stands, it has virtually no chance of passing.  There is no way that any Republican would support such a bill, and with the filibuster in place, no way that it can get past the Senate.

Putting it simply, Manchin's support of the outdated filibuster rule will allow Republicans to pass restrictive voting laws to help them retake congress in twenty twenty two and freeze the Biden administration from doing anything legislatively.  You would think that, as a Democrat, Manchin would care about that, even if he himself is not up for reelection until twenty twenty four.  Instead he clings to this notion of bipartisanship that just doesn't exist anymore.  The Republican Party is still lead by an unpopular, one term president who cost his party the White House and both branches of Congress, and is made up of people who think that Biden only won because the election was rigged, when they aren't following Qanon.   The days of Republican compromise, and really, sanity, are mostly gone.

THE PUSH FOR INFRASTRUCTURE SPENDING

 If you had told me two years ago that Joe Biden would be president, and that he would follow up the most progressive spending plan since the New Deal with another ambitious plan to rebuild the nation's crumbling infrastructure, I never would have believed you.  But here we are. 

Yes, hot on the heel of the stimulus, Biden has now released another big spending plan that proposes to spend around two trillion dollars, paid for by an increase by fifteen years of an increased corporate tax rate.  

The plan basically breaks down into three broad areas of spending: the first is in basic infrastructure, that is, one hundred and fifteen billion dollars for roads and bridges, fifty billion for  disaster resilience, twenty billion to improve road safety, and so on.  Honestly, it's hard to argue against this kind of spending.  Clearly the public needs decent roads and bridges, and the American Society of Civil Engineers consistently gives the public low marks on that score.  Even conservatives know this, remember Trump's pathetic attempts to have an "infrastructure week"?  Another piece of this is an investment in domestic manufacturing and other jobs programs, which, again, should be something that the "America first" crowd should support. 

It's the other two branches of the spending proposal that will cause anger from the right: the first is basically the green new deal, that is, an attempt to shift the country away from gas, oil and coal reliance.   So there's one hundred and seventy four billion dollars for electric vehicle incentives, eighty five billion for public transit, and another hundred billion dollars for electric grids and clean energy.  Some people on the left have already complained that isn't enough, but certainly it's a good start, and it shows a clear design of intent, a blueprint to move into renewable energy sources to do something about climate change. And the spending plan also includes forty billion dollars for new dislocated worker program, to help out people who work in the oil and coal industries.  Obviously the Republican party, with their donations from oil and coal companies, would prefer that America continue to do ignore climate change, but with more and more Americans seeing the urgency of the problem (and the evidence of climate change getting worse with each passing year of record setting natural disasters), this seems like common sense spending.

Finally, there is what appears to be an attempt to undo the terrible legacy of red lining, that practice dating back to the nineteen thirties in which city planners would make sure that poor neighborhoods of color were given the bare minimum of government spending on infrastructure.    So there's over two hundred billion for  affordable housing, one hundred billion for public schools, forty billion for lead pipe removal, and twenty billion dollars to help out underserved communities.  And there's a very interesting part that calls for four hundred billion dollars  to expand access to caregiving for those who are older and those with disabilities, and to improve pay and benefits for caregivers; most of those caregivers are poorly paid women of color.  It's safe to imagine that the Republican party will oppose much of this spending, and get ready to hear cries of "reparations!" on the floors of congress when the proposal is debated.  Which is a shame because these kinds of improvements in poorer neighborhoods will eventually benefit all of America when healthier, better educated children grow up to join the economy.

While the proposal is obviously not a done deal yet, and the inevitable unified Republican opposition will mean that all the Democrats in the Senate will have to support it, it certainly a bold first step in both moving the country into a greener future while also improving the lives of millions of poor and middle class people.  The amazing thing about this proposal is that it is truly progressive in that it literally taxes the rich to help the poor, finally reversing the era of tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts on social programs that Ronald Reagan ushered in back in the eighties.  It's taken a long time, but a plan like this can reverse the widening gulf between the rich and the poor in this country.