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"It’s a damn good thing that the demented pandemo-fascist oligarch Donald Trump no longer sits in the White House and that his Republifascist Party no longer holds the majority in the U.S. Senate. But make no mistake: Americans continue to live under an unelected dictatorship of money and empire. Just because that class dictatorship isn’t quite ready for Door #1, open fascist rule, don’t look for Door #2, neo-New Deal reformist social democracy, anytime soon. No, we are still getting slammed in the face with Door #3, a neoliberal corporate-imperial authoritarianism that cancels #2 while setting us up for a harsher version of #1 in the not-so-distant future.
Status Quo Joe
Biden is showing us that he is what many of us who paid attention knew and warned he was: the Weimarian Third Way/Door. Biden has the full legal authority to cancel all federal student debt. He pledged to use that power if he became president. Now he is refusing to honor the promise. As leading student debt abolitionist Astra Taylor notes:
“At his recent town hall, Joe Biden made a series of convoluted and condescending comments about American student debt…Biden’s rambling justification of the status quo was peppered with straw men, invocations of false scarcity and non-solutions. He pitted working-class Americans against each other, implying that people who attend private schools aren’t worthy of relief, as though poor students don’t also attend such schools. He said that money would be better spent on early childhood education instead of debt cancellation, as if educators aren’t themselves drowning in student debt, and as if we can’t address both concerns at once. He suggested relying on parents or selling a home at a profit to settle your debt, a luxury those without intergenerational wealth or property cannot afford. And he touted various programs, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), that have totally failed borrowers: over 95% of PSLF applicants have been denied…As he rambled on, Biden gave the distinct impression that he preferred not to have the power to do so. That way he could blame Congress should his campaign promises go unkept.”
Then there’s the pathetically low federal minimum wage. Labor and civil rights activists have long called for the national wage floor to be raised to $15 an hour, which translates (assuming 40 hours a week for 50 weeks) to $30,000 a year, equivalent to less than a quarter of the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI) no-frills Basic Family Budget for a family of two parents and two children in the New York City borough (and New York State county) of Queens.
Candidate Biden promised to honor this demand. He’s doing no such thing as president. Biden and his fellow multi-millionaire Democrats in his old dollar-drenched stomping ground, the now majority Democrat U.S. Senate, cannot bring themselves to include the $15 minimum wage (phased in by 2025) in their coming COVID-relief stimulus bill. “Oh,” they say, “we tried, but the rules won’t let us” – a reference to the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling last week that the proposed minimum wage hike is not immune from Republican filibuster because “it doesn’t meet the budgetary requirements of reconciliation.”
This is an excuse. If these corporate Democrats were serious, they’d fire the parliamentarian, as Rep. Ilhan Omar recommends. In 2001, when Senate Republicans didn’t get the reconciliation rulings they liked, they replaced him.
"Yesterday, Popular Information published an in-depth investigation on the corporate cash behind the Georgia legislators pushing voter suppression legislation. The report revealed that major corporations, including Coca-Cola, UPS, Delta, and AT&T, had backed the sponsors of two bills that would significantly restrict voting in Georgia.
A few hours later, a coalition of civil rights groups in Georgia announced a new advocacy campaign based on this research. The coalition, which includes the Georgia NAACP, The New Georgia Project, Black Voters Matter, and Stand Up Georgia, is demanding that corporations headquartered in the state publicly oppose these bills and divest from politicians who are sponsoring them. The group will place ads in newspapers across the state that specifically target Delta, Coca-Cola, Southern Company, UPS, and Aflac."
Janine Jackson interviewed Food & Water Watch's Mitch Jones about the Texas freeze-outs for the February 26, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210226Jones.mp3
Texas Monthly (2/19/21)
Janine Jackson: The winter energy crisis in Texas has led to a number of strange scenes, from frozen fish tanks and basements turned into skating rinks to officials claiming that the crisis—in which more than 4 million people were left without electricity or heat, some without water, during a frigid week, and those whose lights stayed on faced eye-popping bills—was caused by the state's reliance on renewable energy sources. Or, in the words of Gov. Greg Abbott, that it “just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.” Even a critical article on the “disaster foretold” takes the time to spell out:
For the record, no one who is well-informed about energy is suggesting that Texas, or, for that matter, the nation or the world, can or should operate without fossil fuels—in at least the next several decades.
So will that be the takeaway from this chain of events that, by the way, killed at least 80 people, including an 11-year-old boy found frozen in his bed? A round of fingerpointing among officials, followed by a return to the same set piece of debate about "regulation" versus "freedom," a kind of ping-pong match on the edge of a cliff, while regular people wonder if we'll survive the next “unprecedented," "surprise" catastrophe, or the one after that?
Assuming we want to get off this dangerous dime, what type of conversation will move us forward, and what ideas need to be left behind? Mitch Jones is policy director at Food & Water Action and Food & Water Watch. He joins us now by phone from Baltimore. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Mitch Jones.
Mitch Jones: Thank you, Janine; it's great to be back on.
