Sirota’s Note of Despair

Continuing with the common theme, I detect a note of real despair in David Sirota’s piece in the Guardian:

As his poll numbers crater, Biden appears to be offering no course correction, and he still hasn’t signed a stack of executive orders on matters ranging from debt cancellation to drug pricing. Caught between the electorate and Democrats’ campaign sponsors, he appears to have decided that he cannot – or does not want to – stop the spread of the Joker pill. So he is now just mainlining its active ingredients into America’s veins with bold promises and even bolder betrayals.

Consider a brief list:

• Biden promised a $15 minimum wage, and then he and his party promptly abandoned that initiative.
• Biden pledged to halt drilling on federal land and spent the first year of his presidency promising climate action – all while he outpaces Donald Trump’s drill-baby-drill initiatives and deploys his spokespeople to brag about flooding the world with fossil fuels amid the ecological emergency. He has also been using his executive authority to ramp up methane-emitting natural gas exports.
• Biden promised an “immediate cancellation of a minimum of $10,000 of federal student loan debt” – which he has the executive authority to do at any moment. But he’s been refusing to do it and has been trying to overturn bankruptcy court victories for the most beleaguered debtors.
• Biden pledged to protect traditional Medicare and “give Americans a new choice, a public health insurance option”. Then he never again mentioned the public option when he became president. Instead, he is helping his healthcare industry donors further privatize Medicare and reap even more subsidies as insurers reduce coverage, rake in record profits and jack up premiums.
• Biden continues to insist he wants to lower the predatory cost of medicine and distribute vaccine recipes to halt the global spread of Covid. At the same time, he has refused to invoke his executive authority to reduce the price of medicines that were developed with public funding – he has effectively abandoned his Covid vaccine pledge, and he’s intervening in a primary to endorse a Democratic lawmaker who gutted his own drug pricing bill.
• Biden portrays himself as a union supporter and promised to “ensure federal contracts only go to employers who sign neutrality agreements committing not to run anti-union campaigns”. Yet he abandoned his campaign pledge to rein in union-busting federal contractors, he has not implemented his own labor taskforce’s weak recommendations, and his administration gave Amazon a $10bn contract while the company fought labor organizers.

He calls it the “Jokerization of America”.

I suspect he’s also looking at the Democrats’ polling numbers which suggest that the Republicans are likely to take control of both houses of the Congress in the next Congress. That won’t do much to promote President Biden’s agenda. Said another way, this is probably about as good as it’s going to get.