Status Quo Joe's Vicious Debt Ceiling "Deal"

On "Reaching Across the Aisle" to "Get Things Done" with Republi-fascists

He’s about as deep as a credit card.

- Evan Ravitz on Joe Biden, June 3, 2023

So Sleepy Status Quo Joe finally woke up enough to hold one of those timeworn prime-time television  addresses to the nation from the Oval Office.

Was it to declare a national emergency around epidemic gun violence and advance new  initiatives to stem the carnage? And/or maybe the same thing on racist police violence?

What about runaway global warming, the female-enslaving war on women's reproductive rights, and the very real menace of (not-so "semi-") fascism, Amerikan-style, replete with book bannings, putsch attempts, calls for “cival war” and threats of racist pogroms?

How about the need to incarcerate a former president who literally attempted to overthrow previously normative (bourgeois) democracy and constitutional rule of law, to, you know… establish himself as a fascist strongman and president for life?  

How about abject capitalist plutocracy, which renders majority public opinion close to irrelevant on one major policy issue after another? How about the crisis of massive economic inequality, so extreme that the top tenth of the upper US One Percent has as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent – a mind-boggling disparity in a nation where at least 40 million people live below the federal government’s laughably inadequate poverty level and where 6 in 10 people are living paycheck to paycheck. The sharpening assaults on union organizing and bargaining rights and/or on affirmative action and minority voting rights? How about the transformation of one of the nation’s two viable political parties into a fascist organization and the pathetic appeasement of that party by the only other viable political organization, the Democrats?

How about new foreign policy initiatives to stem the rising US-led drift to global and thermonuclear war, a threat that has combined with the climate crisis and the related ongoing specter of pandemicide to lead the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to push the Doomsday Clock closer to Midnight than it’s ever been?  A serious effort to end the Ukraine War and the rising conflict with China by addressing Moscow and Beijing’s regional security concerns and dropping the reckless and fantastic US imperial notion that “we own the world” – that the entire planet is Washington’s legitimate sphere of influence?

How about new initiatives to begin to repair the massive societal and environmental damage inflicted by more than a century of savage US imperialism in Latin America, a central cause of the migrant crisis at the southern US border?

What about an address to the nation touching on all of the above, including issues that cumulatively spell the final collapse of what little is left of US popular sovereignty along with the cancellation of a decent human future?

No, of course none of all that  was remotely touched upon in any slightly serious or sincere way in Biden’s big primetime Address to the Nation.  His television appearance was held to claim that he and his “good friends” in the putschist, vote-suppressing, election-denying, and Christian white nationalist Republi-fascist Party saved the world economy by increasing work requirements on older Food Stamp/SNAP recipients – well, by forging a budgetary “debt ceiling” deal with the Republi-fascists that worsens all the crises listed above.

There’s nothing remotely new about the deal.  It’s the standard, dollar-drenched neoliberal formula that the Dems have joined the other viable and capitalist US party in selling since the mid-late 1970s. It has nothing to do with reducing government deficits and everything to do with serving capitalism-imperialism.  Consistent with the now more than half century old neoliberal policy recipe, it combines tax reductions on the filthy rich, themselves a massive drain on revenue, with significant increases in so-called defense-, really Empire-, spending and reductions in social spending for truly and cruelly disadvantaged Americans.   

I’m not going to go into the grainy details of the deal. That’s already been done by the progressive economist Jack Rasmus here.  You want the numbers, read Dr. Jack; he’s first rate on the details and on the historical context of neoliberalism, which to me is largely capitalism-imperialism returning to its vicious, savagely unequal and anarchic norm in the wake of the historically anomalous long New Deal era that emerged from the Great Depression, the global war against fascism, the social movements of the 1930s and 1960s-70s, and the temporary presence of real socialist revolutionary states posing actual regime alternatives to Western capitalism-imperialism in Russia and China.

In what’s left of this commentary, I want to briefly mention three particularly noxious things about Biden’s deal.

Noxious Fact #1: Biden never needed to make any deal at all.  As a handful of so-called progressive Democrats led by the social democratish US Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out, Biden had the power to bypass Congress altogether by invoking the US Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment’s clause, which states flatly that “the validity of the public debt” cannot be questioned. Why let the Republikaners party get away with threatening to collapse the US economy if they don’t get sadistic social spending budget cuts when the US Constitution straight up says: DO NOT F*#K WITH THE GOVERNMENT’S RIGHT TO PAY ITS BILLS.  

Noxious Fact# 2: contrary to the heartless right-wing narrative about “lazy” welfare recipients, 80 percent of households receiving SNAP/Food Stamp benefits from the federal government have at least one employed adult. A quarter of those households have two working adults and a tenth have three working members.  SNAP recipients’ main problem isn’t a lack of “work discipline” but rather working poverty, also known as unlivable wages and capitalist labor exploitation.

Noxious Fact# 3: an under-reported aspect of the debt-ceiling “deal” accelerates fossil-capitalism’s transformation of our planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber by permitting fossil fuel companies to expedite reviews and obtain licenses more quickly and by giving the despicable Demublikan US Senator Joe Manchin billions of federal dollars for his ruinous, Earth-disfiguring and planet-cooking Mountain Valley gas pipeline in West Virginia.

Wow.  With all due respect for those who quite rightly fight for social justice, democracy, and equality within and beyond the US, there’s no decent social policy or equality or democracy or life really to enjoy on a dead planet.  

As Jack Rasmus notes, there’s nothing new about Biden’s cave to the right.  This is “neoliberalism” 101, the dismal, dollar-drenched Democratic Party playbook since the second half of Jimmy Carter’s administration.  Same as it ever was and sold as usual by the current top Democrat in the name of “reaching across the aisle” to “get things done” (the “vacuous to repressive neoliberal” Obama’s favorite phrase) on a “bipartisan basis.”  Never mind that the rightmost major party has been going Christian white nationalist, that is Amerikaner fascist over the last two-plus decades.

Capital loves this malevolent mess.  It particularly enjoys how the threat of full fascist takeover by the party of Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump (or Ron “DeFascist”) can be used to make the Bernie Sanders and AOC crowd cower under the umbrella of arch-capitalist Neoliberal Democrats like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Biden.  If the full takeover comes, and it very well could (thanks in no small part to the right-tilted Minority Rule nature of the US electoral and governance order), much of US capital will make the best of that as well.

We are so badly overdue for a mass uprising and a socialist revolution it’s not even half funny.   A lot less focus on changing words and a lot more emphasis on changing the world is strongly recommended