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Biden promised not to finance fossil fuels. So why is the US backing a huge gas project?
(www.motherjones.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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politics
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Funny you should say "shit sandwich" -- I had this conversation a little while ago with some of y'all and no one could really attack Biden's record coherently. It's just the "say vaguely bad-sounding things about him over and over from a variety of accounts" strategy, with no effort at backing it up with more than the same handful of like 5-6 anecdotes about some bad thing that happened under his watch.
Like I said there, I actually didn't really realize how much good stuff Biden had done or how hard it was to come up with factual criticism of him, until y'all started attacking him unfairly and I started spending time looking up what he's been up to. I only started on it to see whether you were telling the truth about it.
He completely flipped on immigration. He left Trump era policies in place and made them worse.
He shut down the biggest union action in the last decade.
He's sending weapons to a genocidal regime.
His idea of economic problems is shrinkflation. While grocery stores and land lords have a third of the country over the barrel.
I can keep going. Should I keep going? Should I talk about the continuation of Trump's trade war with China? The protectionist legislation he championed so auto manufacturers can keep prices up and quality down?
Let's rap
Which policies?
There were 458,900 workers involved in work stoppages in 2023, notably including the motion pitcture strike which is the bulk of that huge bar up at the top of the graph. It looks to me like the rail strike involved about 1,100 workers, barely visible down at the bottom. You're talking about the rail strike, yes? You didn't say so but that's the one I'm aware of him shutting down and the talking point that y'all like to use. The rail strike wasn't the biggest union action in the last decade or in 2023; it wasn't 1% of the union action in 2023.
What it looks like to me is that he shut down the rail strike because it would have a big impact on the rest of the economy, then his labor department kept working the issue and got the workers their sick days anyway.
Your assertion is that because he shut down 0.2% of the strikes that happened in 2023, for specific reasons, and then got the workers what they were asking for anyway, he's a bad president for labor?
(Edit: Hang on, is the rail strike not in that chart? Maybe because it didn't happen or it started in 2022, it doesn't show there. I'm trying to look up now how many workers were actually involved; it was more than 1,100.)
(Edit 2: I am totally wrong -- it was 115,000 workers, in 2022 and way more sizable than what I was saying. I still stick with the point that if Biden was anti-union he would have done something about some of the 458,900 people who went on strike in 2023.)
No argument. It's fucked. There are some things he's doing better than a normal president and much much better than Trump, but yes, it's fucked. Hopefully all the noise about a break with Netanyahu starts to turn into less dead or starving Palestinians.
I ... what?
He instituted a minimum 15% corporate tax, he forgave $138 billion worth of student loans, he came out of the COVID apocalypse with the lowest unemployment in 20 years and the strongest recovery out of any first-world country by a pretty decent margin... I honestly can't even tell what you're complaining about here. You're assigning him an idea about what he thinks, and then complaining that his economics are bad because of nothing about what actually happened but because of the belief you assigned him?
Let's stick with those four initial points for a second. What immigration policies? I have a bunch to say about his immigration policies, but I want to know what Trump-era policies you're even talking about him making worse before I say too much about it.
Remain in Mexico. Refusing to honor Asylum unless people manage to get processed through a border control point. Requiring Asylees to stay in the country that's dangerous for them until we oh so graciously give them permission to flee for their lives. Considering Mexico a safe country even though it's perpetually one bad weekend away from the cartels just running the place.
The Rail workers did not get their sick days. Not the ones on the rails working themselves to death. They gave sick days to their office bound workers. The guys who actually keep the trains running are still being forced to work without sick days and under threat of being fired if they fail to show up when called, even if they're at the doctor's office. The inhumane conditions that were brought to light were not fixed. They gave stuff to support staff and called it a victory. It's the biggest union action in the last decade because of the impact it could have had and because it showed us exactly what the politicians think of the working class.
Biden has not taken serious action to reduce grocery prices or other necessities. That's great that he taxed corporations but that doesn't put food on the table. His fixation on shrinkflation can be seen in his speeches. And that's the slight improvement from his attempt to take a victory lap on an economy people are still struggling in. We aren't dumb and we aren't blind.
Which of those policies did Biden make worse and how? Both of what you listed (remain in Mexico and asylum only through a port of entry) are Trump policies. I know Trump did family separation and Biden started the task force to reunite families; did that make things worse?
Things have gotten substantially worse simply because the number of migrants has gone up, but Biden has been fighting with the Republicans to try to get more judges to clear the backlog of asylum cases, trying to get them not to drown people in the Rio Grande, things like that. Do you have some specific policy that he's actually made worse?
What is your source for what you're saying about sick days? Here is mine; the unions and the news have been saying that as of October, 91% of rail workers have sick days (and that link has a link to a PDF that's a little fact sheet about different roles and the benefits they get).
I honestly don't see anything to respond to here. It kinda sounds like a campaign ad -- "doesn't put food on the table" "we aren't dumb." If you want to talk about his economic performance in terms of the numbers instead of the fee fees you're welcome to and I'll respond to what you have to say, but otherwise I'm comfortable with what I've said so far.
I gave you three border policies not two. Then to talk about union stuff you link to the literal industry lobbying organization. Finally you pass off a Gallup Research poll as fee fees.
That's three red flags and a big old nope from me.
Stimulating discussion as always
If anyone actually cares about holding Biden accountable, you can follow along here:
https://twitter.com/PushBidenLeft
There's a pretty massive difference between:
One of those things I'm in favor of. Which one is this article, do you think?
Genuine question for you, what good stuff has Biden done for you? My life is worse now in almost every way than it was pre-COVID and nothing in Biden's track record shows that he plans on reversing that for me.
Biden, like Trump, is a garbage neolib whose biggest accomplishments are funneling more public dollars to the 1% via ridiculous, inefficient contracts, who, unlike Trump, just so happens to not want to kill gay people. The billionaire class is the single greatest threat to Americans and he's done nothing tangible to address or solve that problem.
That's an interesting choice of timeframe. My life has changed a lot since before Covid, too. Can you list some specific ways yours changed that are Biden's fault?
Sure, I'll copy-paste:
I think the first one is probably the biggest one in terms of having a potential impact on me directly. I mean, any amount of change in emissions will probably alter the apocalypse that's coming within my lifetime, to some degree... it's a little bit of a hard thing to judge because it's so abstract and far away, and the outcomes will be so bad regardless that it's hard to celebrate any amount of "progress" that's only drawing down the continuing damage that's added to the pile with every passing year. But specifically because the likely outcomes include so much death and suffering, withdrawing that amount of US emissions will save some large number of human lives way way down the road once the piper starts to ask for the bill in earnest. Whether that'll include my individual life is obviously impossible to say, but it might.
I think it goes without saying that I don't agree with this. Can you list some specific policies and events, similar to the ones I listed above? Every single one of those is something no US president within my lifetime would have done. Can we keep moving forward from there to get a Bernie Sanders in? Sure! Sounds great. Does that mean he's a shit sandwich because he only did that much? No. I'm stunned that he was able to get the carbon emissions bills or the student loan forgiveness through the rest of the current US government.
If you're going to say that all doesn't count, can you list some harm he's done? I'm fine to talk about this stuff.
You know he did the 15% minimum corporate tax which took a big bite out of the "big companies paying no tax through tricksy methods" problem, beefed up the IRS to go after rich tax cheats, and his current budget includes more stuff aimed at the millionaire/billionaire class, right?
These folks aren't operating in good faith.
Have you ever, and I mean ever, seen them point at a deeply divided congress under Biden's tenure as President? Have they reckoned with the fact that anything Biden does by executive order can just as easily be undone? Do they talk of how America is largely moderate and not at all far left? Look around and see them continue to deny Bernie's loss of nine years ago, even while they blame Hillary ad nauseam (twice today by my reading.)
There's little if any good faith coming from these folks, and so they take the cheap, uninformed hits and block their detractors. They know nothing of compromise and little of how governance works, and often can easily be confused for Trump's own lifeblood.
You don't say 🙂
I'm mostly just posting this stuff so that other people can read. Maybe I should get a job with the Biden campaign.
Oh, you are definitely working for the Biden campaign.
It's still important to give at least the initial response.
If people read one narrative with nothing to counter, it's in our nature to believe it. Fiction just wouldn't work otherwise.
I see it all over lemmy where a few, usually new or very young accounts, will pile on me making the same arguments. My favorite one right now is that ‘Biden has done nothing to get marijuana rescheduled’ to which I point to the fact that the decision is currently sitting with the DEA, the group that decides what is in the schedule and where. The response? ‘It’s not done yet so Biden hasn’t done anything’. And because I, a rando on the internet, can’t clairvoyantly say when it will be rescheduled, then it’s not real.
It’s such an asinine argument and I got piled by several accounts with it telling me it’s probably the same chud trying to increase their influence by making it seem like people agree with them.