I know it's considered a faux pas in polite media and Democratic circles to criticize Joe Biden, but a close reading of his latest speech, touting his proposed infrastructure bill, does reveal more than a few troubling "tells."
The first, as outlined by modern monetary theorist Stephanie Kelton in a New York Times op-ed, is Biden's obsession with "pay-fors" and his continued harping on debts and deficits. His nearly $2 trillion in "infrastructure" spending would likely be spread out over an unnecessarily long period of time, and it's not nearly enough to cure what ails us. It focuses not so much on specific needs and specific solutions, but on costs. If the money, as it is wont to do, winds up in the usual hands of privateers and consultants, it will not circulate through the economy. A lot of it will be hoarded.
"It’s honest, it’s fair, it’s fiscally responsible and it pays for what we need and reduces the debt over the long haul," Biden bragged this week, in a distinct echo of the centrist rhetoric of the Pete Peterson Foundation and other austerian think tanks bankrolled by the oligarchy. True, these ruling class narrative-builders now largely agree that deficits don't matter quite so much as they once did, given the emergency of the pandemic and social unrest and the resulting imminent threat to capitalism itself. But once the immediate crisis is over, and the aid money likely privatized to the fullest extent possible, then debts and deficits will begin to matter again, and with a vengeance.
Rather than just borrow money at zero or subzero interest rates, rather than minting a trillion-dollar coin or two or ten as allowed by the Constitution, Biden would instead tax incomes above $400,000, raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent (far too modest) and, in a nod to economist Thomas Piketty, impose a global wealth tax to discourage the use of offshore tax shelters. He does not mention anything about his own home state of Delaware being a tax shelter in its own right, thanks in large part to his own bank-friendly congressional legislation. Lobbyists are no doubt devising loopholes even as we speak.
Biden's plans admittedly do sound downright progressive. But with Bad Cop Senator Joe Manchin formally announcing his opposition to ending the filibuster, and Pope-Queen Elizabeth MacDonough ( a/k/a the Senate parliamentarian) bringing up the rear to nix passage of reconciliation bills requiring only a 51-vote majority, Biden can propose anything he wants and rest assured that most of his proposals benefiting the ordinary people he claims to champion will remain just that - proposals.
So for all the populist rhetoric stuffed in his infrastructure speech the other day, there remained a number of disturbing neoliberal buzzwords and talking points besides "deficit" and "pay-for" that should make our hackles rise.
Examples:
But it also is a blueprint for infrastructure needed for tomorrow, not just yesterday, tomorrow. For American jobs, for American competitiveness.
That's the lead paragraph, signaling right off the bat that Biden is more concerned with US hegemony and cutthroat competition than he is with the well-being of "folks." The race to win the Superpower battle against China is the underlying theme of his entire speech. Our high-speed rail has to be better than their high-speed rail. It just has to be. In order to regain the respect of the rest of the world, we have to restore our place as Number One. Otherwise, the rest of the world will not do our bidding and bend the knee, like in the good old days.
Next, he enthuses about the transcontinental railroad and interstate highway system. The former, completed largely by the near-slave labor of Chinese immigrants and the use of Chinese-invented dynamite, had the core goal of attracting - oftentimes duping - white settlers to the heartland to help exterminate the Indians and enrich the robber barons. The latter was a Cold War project to make it easier to evacuate after a nuclear war with Russia and to sell more cars and polluting gas. Biden signals that cutthroat neoliberalism is by no means dead with these words:
We need to start seeing infrastructure through its effect on the lives of working people in America. What is the foundation today that they need to carve out their place in the middle class to make it.
Ask not what your country can do for you. Arm yourselves instead with your knives and prepare to fight the next battle in the Hobbesian war of All Against All. Solidarity, my ass.
Now, to his credit, Biden does get in a subtle dig at the man he rather dismissively calls "Barack" and his infamous phony sip of Flint water which so cruelly substituted for a presidential public health disaster declaration and a massive federal aid package, including free health care, for the people of Flint:
Ask a teacher or a childcare worker if having clean drinking water, non contaminated drinking water in our schools, in our childcare centers, is part of that foundation. When we know that the lead in our pipes slows a child’s development when they drink that water.
Then again, nor does Biden himself declare a public health emergency in Flint, where lead not only will remain in the bodies of children for their entire lives, but whose own future children will likely be born damaged as a result of the contamination that was deliberately allowed to happen by a whole slew of elected officials. This points to the deliberate lack of specificity in the infrastructure proposal. Come on, man!
Then there was this heartbreaking nugget:
Ask our wounded warriors and military families. To my Republican colleagues in congress, should we modernize VA hospitals, update them?
Not one word about defunding the for-profit and increasingly outsourced and privatized United States military or ending the wars that produce all the wounded warriors. And of course, not one word about the lack of health care for people in foreign lands who are the targets and collateral damage of American imperialism.
Like his former boss, meanwhile, Biden is all fired up and ready to go:
Over 500,000 charging stations on the highways we are going to build to accommodate electric vehicles, so we can own the future. Construction workers and engineers building modern hospitals and homes for American families. Healthcare workers, steel workers, folks who were I work in the cutting edge labs.
Notwithstanding that garbled last sentence, this is an eerie flashback to Obama's own Win the Future campaign slogan. Notice that neoliberal rhetoric is never about the here and now, it is always about making life better in the ephemeral someday for regular people. "Owning the future" does not put food on the table today, despite the Democrats' temporary increase in food stamp benefits, which now pay for maybe two weeks' worth of groceries instead of the previous one week.
The speech now descends into a series of garbled sentences that nonetheless impart some unintentional truth. The underground spring of neoliberalism and rank militarism hidden just beneath Biden's heap of rich neo-populist soil begins to bubble with a xenophobic vengeance right up to the surface:
It’s not part of my speech, but I promise you, you’re all going to be reporting over the next six to eight months how China and the rest of the world is racing ahead of us in the investments they have in the future. Attempting to own the future. The technology, quantum computing, investing significant amounts of money in dealing with cancer and Alzheimer’s. That’s the infrastructure of a nation.
Biden's definition of infrastructure repair is all about one group of predatory capitalists competing against another group of predatory capitalists. China might win instead of Elon Musk and Bill Gates! And meanwhile, please stop with the hate crimes against Asians, which have nothing at all to do with our leaders' own disgustingly bellicose rhetoric.
It gets worse:
So America can lead the world that is as it’s historically done. That’s why I brought back scientists into the White House.
Not to make people's lives better, although it could be a fringe benefit. The purpose of science is to treat disease at a profit and to improve technology and transportation so that American capitalism can win.
Almost fifteen minutes into his speech, Biden really begins to go off the high-speed rails, at an almost reckless rate of belligerence.
We need to think. Look, do we think the rest of the world is waiting around? We’re not going to make those kinds of investments the rest of world’s saying. Take a look. Do you think China is waiting around to invest in this digital infrastructure or in research and development? I promise you they are not waiting. But they’re counting on American democracy to be too slow, too limited, and too divided to keep pace.
Before you know it, China may even start imitating Russia and placing cheesy Facebook ads in order to sow division among Americans. Biden thinks that the average desperate American family also wants nothing more than the opportunity to traverse the whole width of America at a high rate of belligerent speed. It's road rage change you can believe in.
Now, about how we're gonna pay for it. Biden wants to tax the rich and increase taxes on corporations - not to punish deserving jerks like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, of course, but rather to bring some feel-good parity between rapacious billionaires and the barely-making-it. This is a standard neoliberal talking point, a throwback to Obama's "Share the Sacrifice" sermons admonishing the foreclosed and evicted to find common ground with those doing the foreclosing and the evicting. Because we're all in this together!
Not fleece them. (the corporations) 28%. If you’re a mom and dad, a cop, firefighter, police officer, et cetera you’re paying close to that in your income tax.
Biden seems to think that cops and police officers are two different jobs. Speaking of which, his much-ballyhooed executive order for mild gun control will apparently not be accompanied by an order recalling all that deadly military hardware and assault weaponry from even small-town police departments under the "community policing" initiatives he spearheaded as vice president.
The divisions of the moment shouldn’t stop us from doing the right thing for the future.
Or as Stephen Colbert lampooned the neoliberal concept of futurism back when he was still funny: "A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow."
Biden's concluding microburst of bombast would put Donald Trump himself to shame:
Tell the kids, the young people that work for me, I told my kids, when I go on college campuses, they’re going to see more change in the next 10 years then we’ve seen the last 50 years. We’re going to talk about commercial aircraft flying at subsonic speeds, supersonics speeds. Be able to figuratively, if we decided to do it traverse the world in about an hour, traveled 21,000 miles an hour. So much has changed. We have got to lead it.
This may sound like your grandpa on crack. But God love him and bless the troops, at least he fired (as opposed to firing up) the young people who worked for him because they admitted to past pot use. Because if you're too mellowed out on weed, how can you ever imagine circumnavigating the globe at centrifugal force?
