COMMENT: Biden's First 100 Days
The Biden administration has already reneged on all its major campaign promises
Note: I am going to begin sharing here occasional comments on politics and current events. To get things started, I’m posting two such comments I had previously shared on Facebook. This one—presented here with a few nonsubstantive edits—was written on April 28th, 2021.
Well, today marks the end of Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office. And, contrary to recent comments by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—the utter fraud and awesome disappointment that she is—no reasonable person of good conscience ought to view the Biden administration as having “definitely exceeded [the] expectations that progressives had.”
We have, in fact, received from the Biden-Harris camp precisely the “much more conservative administration” that was anticipated by many of us who possess even a cursory familiarity with Biden’s career history as a neoliberal corporatist, warmonger, and inveterate liar masquerading as a working-class champion.
What evidence is there to support this claim? Well, for starters, Biden has already reneged on multiple major and publicly explicit campaign promises: his personal promise directly to Bernie Sanders that he would support and push hard for an increase of the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour (as woefully inadequate as even that doubling would be); his pledges to lower the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 60 and to allow Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for reduced prescription drug prices; and his repeated promise during the recent Georgia senatorial campaigns that $2,000 emergency relief checks “will go out the door immediately” if the Democrats gain control of the Senate (which they did, but the checks were then delayed, means tested, and insultingly reduced to $1,400).
Moreover, the Biden administration has continued to carry out many of the vicious and exploitative nationalist and imperialist projects undertaken by his predecessors, proving once again Marx’s dictum that—regardless of any superficial differences in leadership which may from time to time arise—“the executive of the modern state is [always] but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" at the expense of everyone else and life on the planet generally.
To wit, a partial litany of the unsurprising betrayals committed by Biden in his first 100 days: he has approved over 30 new permits for oil and gas drilling, despite promises to curtail the expansion of ecocidal fossil fuel extraction; he has expressed support for maintaining mandatory minimum drug sentencing rules implemented by Trump, despite having apologized for his earlier role in facilitating the implementation of such racist and unjust mandatory sentences through his authorship of the 1994 Crime Bill; he has opened additional concentration camps for migrants, including at least one facility especially for migrant children, despite promising to cease such appalling detention practices; he has signaled his intention to continue to construct significant portions of Trump’s border wall, which entails exercising eminent domain to confiscate land from American citizens, despite his promise to end that construction and confiscation; he has issued guidance to the Supreme Court urging the Court to rule in the case of Caniglia v. Strom such that police may then be allowed to invade citizens' homes and seize their guns without a warrant—a grotesque violation of the Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure; he has announced his intention to keep in place most of the economic sanctions Trump imposed upon Iran and Venezuela, a practice which serves virtually no political purpose but that severely harms and immiserates the Iranian and Venezuelan people.
And, although this isn’t an example of a broken campaign promise, it bears mentioning that Biden has done absolutely nothing to hold accountable any of the figures (including Donald Trump) who conspired to incite the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. He has, however, approved the continued deployment through May 23rd of thousands of National Guard troops in Washington D.C., ostensibly for the purpose of protecting against further domestic terror attacks by the barbarians at the gate. Functionally, this represents the first phase of what I expect will become a permanent occupation by the U.S. military of its own capital city: few clearer examples of the empire’s decline and fall can be imagined.
Now, alongside these and other nightmarish policies, there are a few ways in which the Biden-Harris administration has been an improvement over the Trump-Pence one. First, it can never be overstated how uniquely dangerous Donald Trump—a surpassingly sadistic malignant narcissist, deranged psychopath, and bigoted, imbecilic neofascist—was in the office of President; literally anyone else with a pulse (here Biden barely qualifies) would represent an enormously substantial improvement. Second, Biden and his administration have quite smoothly navigated the coronavirus pandemic—tragically and genocidally politicized by Trump, his despicable allies, and his ignorant supporters—by skillfully managing the mass production and free distribution of vaccines. Third, Biden has recently announced his intention to withdraw the United States military from Afghanistan—after twenty years of murderously criminal occupation—by September 11th, 2021. If this indeed comes to pass (which I highly doubt, considering that Biden and his then-running mate, Barack Obama, campaigned on the same false promise over a decade ago), then it will represent perhaps the only meaningfully successful effort at exerting civilian control over the military-industrial complex in my lifetime.
Despite these and other small improvements, life in America under the Biden administration has remained largely as horrific as it was under the Trump administration. Indeed, that may be the only campaign promise that Biden has kept: in June of 2019, he swore to a room full of wealthy donors at a fancy fundraising event on New York’s Upper East Side that “nothing will fundamentally change” if he were to be elected president. And for most poor, working class, and middle class people in America struggling to survive a catastrophic pandemic and economic depression—to say nothing of most people suffering under the jackboot of the United States military abroad—that has proved to be the case.