With the Coronavirus and its horrendous results taking up all the space in our world today and with our egomaniacal President sucking all the air out of whatever is left, there doesn’t seem to be any air available for anything else. But there’s an election coming up and unless we want to spend another four years listening to lies and watching a madman take apart our nation’s structure, Joe Biden, the man who is the presumptive choice of the Democratic Party and we hope the majority of the nation, had better get off his ass and grab some attention before things start slipping away.
We’re all aware that the restrictions caused by the pandemic have altered the natural rhythms of an election campaign and forced both campaigns to take on new patterns. The time normally spent visiting communities all around the nation, pressing the flesh and kissing babies is no longer viable. Person to person communication, a serious Biden strength, is out the door. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other, vitally important things that can and must be done if Biden is going to take the Oval Office from the Fat Liar.
It’s pretty much agreed that because Trump is the incumbent and because he’s the bizarre figure that he is, this election will be pretty much about him.
But that doesn’t mean that Biden should sit in his office and do nothing but comment on Trump’s incompetent actions and un-presidential behavior. The best way for Joe to widen the electoral gap between Trump and himself is not just to point out Trump’s shortcomings and the problems they caused, but even more importantly he must inform us as to what he will do to solve those problems once he wins.
What this country needs is a Marshall Plan for America and Biden needs to design that plan and tell the American people what he will do and how he will do it once he’s in office. And he must pound home the point that he won’t be able to pull it off if we don’t give him a majority in both houses of congress.
Of course the most immediate problem is Covid-19 and it’s hard to imagine it still not being the most important problem on November 3rd. So far, there is no solution to this virus but there are certainly ways to deal with it and mitigate its results. Biden must assume that on Election Day, we will still not have solved any of the problems of the virus. We may not have a vaccine, therapeutics, universal testing or contact tracking. These must all be approached as unsolved problems because there still may not, at that point, be any firm knowledge of what has and has not been accomplished. Trump’s lies have left us in this ultra vulnerable place where no matter what he says, we can depend on nothing.
So the first thing Biden must do is put the whole nation on emergency footing. His message must be, “Trump has done nothing to save you so I will do everything.” Then he must claim control of every aspect of the way we deal with the virus and he must have an army of virus fighters ready to go on 1/21/21. Sure, a lot of that stuff will already be underway but Biden knows what is in progress and what has to be added and he should be ready to put them together and claim credit for all. Trump has been claiming credit for everything even as he has done nothing. It’s time to turn that around. If Biden lays out a plan now, no matter what Trump does in the interim, Biden can scoop it all up and claim it as his.
The next step should be environmental but unfortunately it has to be economic. Given that, there is no reason why they can’t be combined. In fact they should be, because given the current situation they co-depend.
Mother Nature is strong. If we just give her a little respect she can and will come roaring back. The virus driven shut down has shown us that even small measures can produce big results in environmental cleanup. What little intelligence we have managed to show in our environmental pursuits, should tell us where and when, we could get ahead of the environmental curve.
Two months of reduced fossil fuel driven transportation have made a significant difference in our air quality. Interestingly enough during the same time period renewable energy has dropped in cost below coal. It was already below oil and nuclear. So now we are working with an energy source that is not only better for the planet, but also cheaper to use. Has there ever been anything that is more of a no-brainer?
And then comes the big bonus. Renewable energy is now one of the biggest employers in the world and if it takes over completely it will be one of the biggest solutions to our current unemployment problem imaginable.
The other will be infrastructure.
We have been talking about infrastructure ever since Roosevelt created the CCCP and the WPA and Eisenhower built our national highway and damn systems. But we haven’t done anything about it for 70 years. It was one of Trump’s biggest promises but he couldn’t figure out a way to have it make money for himself so it went by the boards.
The result of 70 years of inactivity is that our roads are like washboards, our grid system is pathetically inadequate, our railroads don’t come close to producing the level of transportation even close to necessary for a nation our size, our internet capacity isn’t even up to a third world nation, our ability to deal with rising seas is limited to the Army Corp of Engineers ability to shovel sand and our airports are among the worst in the world. Sure it will take money, plenty of
money, but it will also put most of the currently unemployed into jobs for the foreseeable future. Those are jobs that pay a decent wage and that come with benefits, jobs that will often be better than the jobs they lost in the pandemic.
This is not some quick pick-me-up or a free ride. This is real employment over a couple of decades that did not exist before and will significantly rebuild an old nation in desperate need to renewal. And with interest rates near zero we will finally be able, as a nation, to afford it.
Look, manufacturing will never be able to replace all the jobs lost in the pandemic or even all the jobs lost to robotics. Robotic manufacturing will be increasing not decreasing in the future. It’s the only way to remain competitive. Most of the renewable energy vehicles that will be built; will be built by robots. But the highways, the airports, the energy fields, the physical grid will be built by people and those jobs will continue for decades. Joe Biden must tell us about that and project it as the warhead of his plan to renew America. Trump had the right motto; he just hadn’t had a chance to screw up the country enough to make it necessary.
There are other areas of governance that Biden will have to have plans for such as healthcare, education, guns and how to control our military spending. He has already spoken about each area and he seems to have intentions in each but he has not as yet laid out serious plan on how he and his administration will approach each.
It seems pretty clear that he will attempt to take an approach to healthcare that will mimic the one put forth in the Democratic debates in which he will push for coverage for all that want it while leaving those who don’t to keep whatever employer supplied plans they now have. His may not be the best plan in the long run but it will certainly suffice while we deal with all the other things that have to be repaired after four years of Trump. Education is not an area of great controversy except in how to get the money that will enable us to educate our children to a point where they see clearly what a stain on the nation people like Trump and his sycophants really are.
The biggest problem in this group is military spending because it entails reigning in a powerful group of industrialists who, as a matter of policy, fall back on the fact that they provide jobs through their useless and wasteful manufacturing practices. In fact we don’t need anywhere near the numbers of weapons we are currently making. In fact we need to slam the breaks on the wasteful policies of the Pentagon, which allow these evils to continue but the fact is that most American’s just like the idea of being armed to the teeth and don’t trust anyone who looks to a sensible arms policy. This is going to be a tough one.
The biggest social problem confronting our nation is economic inequality, the separation of the very rich from the rest of the population. It has been evident since long before any virus attacked us. We have always had very rich people but we have now run into an environment where some people have acquired such staggering wealth as to almost make them a different species. Some have handled their wealth with intelligence and subtle finesse, while others brashly throw it in the faces of the rest of the population. This problem does not just exist in capitalist economies. It is generally the result of the capitalist generator called entrepreneurship but it is in fact flourishing right now in almost every type of government from democracy to socialism to communism and on to whatever economic design is in place anywhere in the world.
To stop it entirely would be to stop the economic engine that drives our train but it most certainly must be controlled for our nation to truly flourish.
One of the principal ways in which our billionaire class manages to acquire staggering wealth so quickly at this time is our tax structure. It favors the super rich to such an unbalanced extent that it defeats any attempt to flatten out the wealth curve or to give the nation the fiscal resources it needs to compete on a universal basis. Biden must unveil a plan, that, will show the American voter he is trying to help the average guy by leveling fair taxes on the rich while encouraging programs that raise wages and help other programs like free college and the reduction of existing tuition debt. Reducing the cost of clean energy should be a big part of this but so should programs like a tax on all stock market trades, a super wealth tax like the one Elizabeth Warren proposed, a minimum income tax and a minimum corporate tax that would prevent businesses and individuals of great wealth from not paying any taxes, as is now the case.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with being really, really rich. Most of us would like that for ourselves. But there is something really, really wrong with being really, really rich and allowing your wealth to crush the dreams of the rest of our countrymen and that, to a large extent, is what is happening in this country right now. That can’t be allowed to continue and Joe Biden must announce a plan to slow or stop it. Right now our laws are rewarding passive investment instead of labor. That has to stop. That’s what Trump stands for, rich old men supporting useless preppie brats instead of hard working people supporting themselves and their families. This is one that’s sure to generate votes.
But ultimately after the virus, infrastructure and the environment, it’s going to be foreign affairs that Joe Biden needs most to get a firm grip on and sell to the American people. The world we now live in won’t allow any nation to close it’s airports and docks and go back to the pre-WWII era of isolation that Donald Trump wants. Trump has made it a policy to end the kinds of international agreements that have kept this country and the world safe for the past 70 years. He has put this country and the world in danger and now we need Joe Biden to not just get us back on the right track but to inform us as to how he is going to do so. Joe has to lay out a plan to meet with leaders all over the world and rebuild the relationships that Trump in his stupidity and arrogance has destroyed.
We also need Joe to sit down with those leaders who have not been friendly with us and to work out deals based on what’s best for them and us, deals that will help us find a common ground with those who have opposed us. We need, and Joe is just the kind of guy who can do this, to explain to others, how it is in our mutual interests to get along, and how we can best help each other to achieve all our aims.
There were two great powers during the cold war, Russia and us. Neither had the kind of leadership that could make the other understand and accept that if we each helped the other, we could share a world that was more than rich enough to make everyone happy and prosperous. We failed then. We have a second chance. Are we going to fail again?
This time it’s China. Will we share the world or will we lose it by fighting over dumb shit?
There are signs that president Xi is more than smart enough to realize that his best chance of bringing his nation to the pinnacle of success is to cooperate with the United States. Up to now his problem has been that he is dealing with a stupid dishonest cur that has no respect for anything but his own wants. Trump only respects the dictator who will punch him in the mouth. That’s how all bullies are. Xi doesn’t need to be a bully. He already has one sixth of the world’s population and is the economic megalith on the board.
One of the main reasons we have never been able to get the world to settle down and function has been our paranoia over communism. We fought a useless war over it in Korea. Then LBJ, a really smart guy, lost his cool and got us into Vietnam because the French yelled “Commie!” It’s interesting that this supposed political philosophy of the people, always ends up with some bad guy screwing those people who blindly followed him. It never works but it’s always there because our leaders have always tried to fight it instead of giving it what I wants and letting it rot from inside.
Joe Biden has to show us that he understands this and that he is the guy to put the world back together. If he can show us intention and solution and how his will be different than Trump’s he will walk away with the election. If he doesn’t we could be in big trouble.