For as long as I’ve been writing this substack, I’ve referred to ‘Biden’s handlers’ rather than Biden himself. Biden himself is a shambles, periodically reanimated for short bursts. He’s pushing 80, and isn’t one of those octogenarians you point to as particularly vital. He’s a figurehead for the preponderant top of the US ruling class in capitalist democracy, who represents the Dream Hoarding top 20%, and their Frankenstein Monster military industrial complex.
So, how have Biden’s handlers done this year?
On January 6, populist protestors—many aligned with Trump—stormed the U.S. Capitol and sent their bought and paid for representatives scurrying for a couple hours. Since President Joe Biden took office on January 20, just two weeks after the event, ruling class acamedia have been engaged in a struggle to smear populism with a broad brush in favor of the establishment. Trump was silenced on social media.
Biden’s handlers committed to restoring establishment prestige among the masses. When they took office, we were in the midst of a global pandemic whose official death toll in the U.S. was at 407,000. The Dream Hoarders’ economy was on the mend, our foreign relationships weakened, and government divided by populists, some of whom were lawmakers themselves. Today, the same in all essential respects—the figurehead president hasn’t much mattered.
Rhetorically, Biden’s handlers vowed to overcome Covid. The Trump team had refused to confer during the transition period with the Biden team, who discovered that the previous administration had never had a plan for federal delivery of covid vaccines, simply planning to give them to the states and then let the cash-strapped states figure out how to get them into arms. Not much changed in a year. This week Biden proclaimed on Covid-19: “Look, there is no federal solution. This gets solved at the state level.”
Biden followed the basic Trump plan already in place, invoking the Defense Production Act, bought more vaccines, worked with states to establish vaccine sites and transportation to them, and established vaccine centers in pharmacies across the country. Biden’s handlers vowed to make sure that 70% of the U.S. adult population would have one vaccine shot and 160 million U.S. adults would be fully vaccinated by July 4th. They failed.
At the same time, the Demopublicans sought further stabilization of the capitalist system, already on the mend after the shutdowns from the prior year. In March, they passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan which jump-started the ravaging inflation now running at near 7%, and extended temporary benefit measures provided by Trump’s handlers, now largely expiring, despite the Omicron variant.
In November, the bourgeois bought and paid for representatives abandoned the social Build Back Better ideas, and instead passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that will shovel money to the section of the ruling class engaged in building and construction.
With more experience in foreign affairs than any president since George H. W. Bush, Biden’s foreign policy run by ‘experts’ has been a disaster. On January 20, he took steps to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords, which his predecessor had rejected, but still hasn’t contributed a dime to the Green Climate Fund, which is the key component. In 2010, the Green Climate Fund was established to collect donations from more developed countries to help small and developing nations adapt to climate change and reduce emissions. The developed countries pledged to muster $100 billion a year by 2020. At the end of 2020, however, the Green Climate Fund had only raised $7 billion. The Obama administration pledged $3 billion to the climate fund, but the U.S. has only paid in $1 billion so far.
Biden and Blinken increased the use of sanctions against those suspected of opposing US ruling class policy, disrupting the world financial system, and encouraging other countries to move away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Biden convened a Summit for Democracy, where his handlers had him try to rally junior imperialist allies against those who have opposed US ruling class hegemony. This, augmented by a further trillion dollars shoveled to the military industrial complex.
Biden’s ‘expert’ handlers disastrously withdrew from Afghanistan, demonstrating that 20 years of ‘nation-building’ was a complete farce as the US puppet government folded faster than a 2-7 off suit in Texas Holdem.
In April, Biden said he would change the agreement he had inherited from Trump, beginning, not ending, the troop withdrawal on May 1. The Taliban did not agree. Biden’s handlers preferred he would have everyone out by September 11, the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks that took us there in the first place, in order to propagandize a ‘peace with honor’ handover to the puppet regime. He promised to evacuate the country “responsibly, deliberately, and safely” and assured Americans that the U.S. had “trained and equipped a standing force of over 300,000 Afghan personnel” who would “continue to fight valiantly, on behalf of the Afghans, at great cost.”
Instead, the Afghan army crumbled as the U.S began to pull its remaining troops out in July. By mid-August, the Taliban had taken control of the capital, Kabul, and the leaders of the Afghan government fled, abandoning the country to chaos. People rushed to the airport to escape and seven Afghans died, either crushed in the crowds or killed when they fell from planes to which they had clung in hopes of getting out. Then, on August 26, two attacks outside the Kabul airport killed at least 60 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. troops. More than 100 Afghans and 15 U.S. service members were wounded. The cherry on top was a drone strike against civilians on the way out which murdered an Afghan family.
In the aftermath, the US ruling class has used its leverage to starve the civilian population by freezing Afghan assets. This is the US playbook—that which cannot be controlled must be rendered ungovernable.
With the end of that war, Biden has focused on using financial pressure and alliances and destabilization to achieve foreign policy goals. He has worked with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) junior imperialists to further encroach on Russia, while suggesting publicly that further Russian attempts to defend its interests will have serious financial repercussions.
With all that, Biden’s handlers have to be considered a failure if the goal was to re-establish establishment prestige. We are ending 2021 as we began it. Biden and his handlers have failed to stem the pandemic’s tide, protect workers’ interests, and inched closer to nuclear Armageddon.
2022 is a year in which the people get to approve one slate of bought and paid for representatives or another. What can we look forward to?
Both parties continue to stoke culture wars and racial divisions to rally segments of their ‘base.’
Biden’s handlers face a landscape where 68% of Republicans believe that Biden is an illegitimate president, and Republicrat-dominated states have taken the law into their own hands at the state level by passing voting laws favorable to their wing of the ruling class; Demopublicans will pursue their own power grab at the national level while they still control Congress.
Demopublicans will increasingly rely on acamedia propaganda from ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶H̶o̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶C̶o̶m̶m̶i̶t̶t̶e̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶U̶n̶-̶A̶m̶e̶r̶i̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶A̶c̶t̶i̶v̶i̶t̶i̶e̶s̶The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol as it shows what it has ‘learned’ from the testimony of more than 300 witnesses and a review of more than 35,000 documents.
On to 2022!