A lot of people are reluctantly supporting Biden but don't have any specific reasons to like him. There is a constant wail of how Dems barely hold the line while Reps actively destroy things. I think this narrative was correct for Clinton & Obama but is totally wrong for Biden. People don't see how different this government has been. Here is a thread of some of the things Biden's govt has done.
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Reversing the IRS's enforcement priorities from poor people to rich.
For decades, the IRS gradually shifted from enforcement against the biggest taxpayers to acting against the poor. Congress kept defunding the (tax) police in order to help the rich:
Under Biden, thanks to funding in the Inflation Reduction Act in 2023, this changed:
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As the agency’s ability to audit the rich crumbles, its scrutiny of the poor has held steady in recent years. Meanwhile, a new study shows that audits of poor taxpayers make them far less likely to claim credits they might be entitled to.
For 20 years, people have complained about Amazon abusing its market power to take up more and more space in the US and world economy. Books and scholarly tracts have been written:
In 2023, the Biden Administration sued Amazon for its many monopolistic behaviors. Some people think the lawsuit is too ambitious. And maybe it is. But I'll tell you this, you're not seeing so many tech consolidations now.
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Climate change is probably the biggest issue facing the world. For 30 years, US presidents led the global blockade against meaningful climate action. In 2022, the Biden Administration got the "Inflation Reduction Act" (a rebranded Green New Deal) through a closely divided legislature, making the US a global leader on many clean energy technologies.
Now, the big complaints are that it's too industry-focused and that people haven't heard about it.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/07/inflation-reduction-act-climate-biden-00050230
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But if you talk to climate leaders around the world, you'll hear that they are now trying to get their countries to catch up to the US on these policies. This is the kind of change that was unimaginable 5 years ago. I certainly never expected it from Joe Biden. It's a testament to Green New Deal organizing and climate organizing more generally, and to the Biden Administration's receptiveness to good ideas. Why do you think AOC & Bernie are now supporting him?
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Biden's biggest mistake has been failing to reform the Supreme Court.
But on the down-low, he's doing much more.
He has appointed judges more quickly than Trump or Obama, so almost 1/4 of federal judges are Biden appointees.
He has appointed a Black woman former public defender and now brilliant jurist to the high court, Ketanji Brown Jackson.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/judicial-nominations-200-senate-confirmation-biden/
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The milestone comes with the confirmation of two judges to the federal district court in Arizona.
Getting back to the Green New Deal, I'll just repost what I wrote the other day from AOC. She notes that the term "Green New Deal" and her name is toxic for some Americans, so they keep those brands off of things. But they are doing a lot, quietly. One great example is here:
https://thepit.social/@stevenbodzin/112768443769445595
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Attached: 2 images I just keep thinking about this from the AOC interview on 99% Invisible. "I started to turn to how do I do things without my name being on it and without Green New Deal being on it but it actually being a Green New Deal project...." https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-power-broker-04-rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/transcript/#playlist
Biden has repeatedly, insistently, forgiven billions of dollars in student debt.
First he offered $10k-$20k per person, across the board. This was a smart, progressive way to deal with debt, since poor people tend to have smaller debts that are nevertheless more debilitating.
https://studentaid.gov/debt-relief-announcement
As you might know, the Supreme Court killed the program on the thinnest pretext, largely on the back of its invented "major questions doctrine."
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But the Biden administration has come back with more. He has ensured that people get the relief they deserve for doing public-service jobs, after prior presidents' ignoring the program and making it useless.
4,750,000 Americans have gotten $167,000,000,000 of student debt relief under Biden. That's an average of $35,000 per beneficiary. That's a life-changing number.
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My personal favorite action has been the CHIPS Act. Nobody's heard of it. It's a law to subsidize clean-energy factories in the US. Most of the money will go to provide high-paying clean-energy jobs in "red" states, with an emphasis on diverse hiring.
Biden is using a green future to provide what Trump claims is only possible through more oil: hope for the heartland.
As Brookings says, this is an ambitious effort to heal the country's economic divides.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/can-the-chips-act-heal-the-nations-economic-divides/
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The CHIPS and Science Act—the sprawling technology package Congress passed last week—has been called many things. What started as the Endless Frontier Act became the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, then the COMPETES Act, the Bipartisan Innovation Act, CHIPS-Plus, and finally, the CHIPS and Science Act. Along the way, some senators called the bill a […]
Biden pulled the US out of Afghanistan.
He tore off the bandage and just pulled out.
Plenty of people tried to make political hay about how the pullout was messy and some of the US's friends there suffered. But Biden did it. He showed courage in the face of decades of policy stagnation and just did the thing that Bush, Obama, and Trump were too scared to do.
This was a war that was started with no exit plan. He was right to end it, and people know that.
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taking a break to enjoy the weekend.
but i hope that if you think that Biden hasn't done anything in his first term, you will at least give these things some thought.
And beyond quibbling with their details, what I'd like to know is how you see anyone getting more done in such a divided country. Many of these are structural changes that will reduce those divides and make bigger changes possible in the future. It may not be the only or best strategy, but it's a strategy. What's yours?
@stevenbodzin I mean, OK, I disagree with most of the others, but the Afghanistan one is outrageous.
Pulling out of Afghanistan created chaos and plunged the country to darkness: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/16/middleeast/kabul-afghanistan-withdrawal-taliban-intl/index.html
On top of that, Biden's administration stole $3.5bn of Afghan people's assets: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/11/politics/executive-order-afghanistan-9-11-humanitarian-aid/index.html
So in summary, the US, invaded, occupied the country for 20 years, fostered corruption during that time, and then left abruptly creating chaos and stealing their money. But hey, most Americans agreed with this, so I guess that is all that matters. The only way you can see this as a positive move is if you completely ignore the humanity of the people living in Afghanistan.
When you ask yourselves "Why do they hate us?" the answer is not "because of our freedom" but "because of shit like this".
Hundreds of people poured onto the tarmac at Kabul’s international airport, desperately seeking a route out of Afghanistan on Monday, after the Taliban’s sudden seizure of power sparked a chaotic Western withdrawal and brought to a crashing end the United States’ two-decade mission in the country.
@stevenbodzin That's a somewhat problematic interpretation.
Biden didn't really have a choice. The pull-out was required under the SOFA that Pumpkin signed with Afghanistan. He would have to declare war on Afghanistan — and probably get an approval for it from the Congress — in order to stay beyond the aurhorisation of armed forces presence expiring.
@stevenbodzin I believe this is in general (not only in the US, but I can see a lot of parallels here in Germany) a really smart strategy for progressives to implement their policies.
So much of the conservative petro-masculine media-circus is based on dogwhistles based on certain terminologies, which are used to hype up the masses and to sow divide.
Bypassing all this, removing your personality from the public, is apparently a great and necessary way to get things done.
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