On the Precipice: a Progressive Agenda in the Biden Era Published by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Office, May 2020
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On the Precipice: A Progressive Agenda in the Biden Era Published by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Office, May 2020 Executive Director: Andreas Günther Editor: Kazembe Balagun, Aaron Eisenberg and Maria Savel Address: 275 Madison Avenue, Suite 2114, New York, NY 10016 Email: [email protected] Phone: +1 (917) 409-1040 With support from the German Foreign Office. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is an internationally operating, progressive non-profit institution for civic education. In cooperation with many organizations around the globe, it works on democratic and social participation, empowerment of disadvantaged groups, alternatives for economic and social development, and peaceful conflict resolution. The New York Office serves two major tasks: to work around issues concerning the United Nations and to engage in dialogue with North American progressives in universities, unions, social movements, and politics. www.rosalux.nyc 2 Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office On the Precipice: A Progressive Agenda in the Biden Era Bidenfreude: COVID-19 in the Post-Trump U.S. 5 By Rob Wallace Pushing Biden to Addess the U.S.’ Housing Crisis 13 By Oksana Mironova The High Stakes of Defending Public Education 22 By Ujju Aggarwal Class Struggle and Solidarity: What Labor Still Needs Under Biden 29 By Kari Thompson Demand Everything: Joe Biden and the Portal to a Green New Deal 37 By Adrien Salazar How to Design and Pay for a Green New Deal 47 By Fadhel Kaboub 3 On the Precipice: A Progressive Agenda in the Biden Era Hopes for New Beginnings on U.S. Trade Policy 57 By Karen Hansen Kuhn More Military Money, More Problems 64 By Ashik Siddique U.S.-China: Progressive Internationalist Strategy Under Biden 78 By Tobita Chow & Jake Werner A Delicate Balance: The U.S.-Russia Relationship Under Biden 94 By David Klion The Biden Administration and Trump’s Ashes: A UN Phoenix? 100 By Thomas G. Weiss Biden’s Nuclear Agenda 107 By Joseph Gerson The Changing Same: Biden and the False Promise of a “Return to Normalcy” 113 By Kali Akuno 4 Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office Bidenfreude: COVID-19 in the Post-Trump U.S. By Rob Wallace Transmission electron microscopic image of an isolate from the first US case of COVID-19, formerly known as 2019- nCoV, a coronavirus, March, 2020. Image courtesy CDC/ Hannah A Bullock, Azaibi Tamin. (Photo by Smith Collection/ Gado/Getty Images) A jokester once characterized Yale University as a hedge fund with a cam- pus attached to it. One might say something similar of the country in which Yale is based. The United States is abandoning what recently deceased political scientist Leo Panitch described as its responsibilities in managing global capitalism for the bourgeoisie worldwide. With public health and other earmarks of the modern state abandoned within even its own borders, the U.S. seems now more a stock market with a country attached. It’s true, on the other hand, that the magical thinking of never-ending eco- nomic growth has long anchored the American political ethos in settler ex- pansionism. Nothing is more important than perpetual growth. Everything else—even our shared humanity and life on Earth itself—is to be sub- sumed under that prime directive. 5 On the Precipice: A Progressive Agenda in the Biden Era But this year’s COVID-19 outbreak alerted the world of a nation’s identity turned inside-out like a smelly sock. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the U.S.’s nearly as fast a fall, however part of a longue durée decline from the its peak as a center of capital, should flabbergast even the sharpest of rad- ical observers. For even a Biden administration may prove no prophylaxis for the COVID outbreak and American decline overall. Graphic Content The potion of economic growth did not save the day during the pandemic. Those countries that kept their economies opened at the expense of its population’s morbidity and mortality—the U.S., Mexico, Chile, Belgium, among others—suffered worse COVID outbreaks and greater economic losses. Wealth, on the other hand, remained protected, growing in record draughts and in ever greater concentration. Over the pandemic, March to December, the collective wealth of America’s 651 billionaires grew by more than a trillion U.S. dollars. That’s nearly four times the $267 billion in one- shot stimulus checks sent to 159 million Americans earlier in the year. Daily U.S. COVID hospitalizations and S&P 500 closing index, March 17-December 18, 2020. 6 Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office One can’t help but be outraged. Toward the end of the year, a graph circu- lated on the online left showing a direct relationship between daily S&P Index closings for the top 500 companies’ stock prices listed on the ex- change and accumulative COVID deaths in the U.S. On its face, such a vulgarity of “dying for the market” seems a spurious correlation. Accumulative cases are always going to rise. So we might bet- ter plot the S&P and COVID hospitalizations for days the market was open, in this case, in the nearby plot, for March 17-Dec 18. Hospitalizations ping up and down upon each COVID wave, marking the immediate state of the outbreak better than cumulative caseload. We can see here stock prices split through the first two U.S. COVID waves, with different closings in the index—high and low—at the same level of hospitalizations. It appears upon the start of each COVID wave stock prices shorted, bouncing back only on the wave’s decline. Research earlier in the outbreak showed just such a negative bias in stock closings, depressing the index more upon bad COVID news than the amount it bounced back upon good. So the market does react to news in the real world, even as financializa- tion—investing in debt and currency—is increasingly divorced from the real economy (and the vast majority of people’s everyday lives). Or, in the more updated interpretation, as financialization increasingly drives the real economy regardless of the various perverse outcomes. Geographer Albina Gibadullina recently plotted financialization by industri- al sector across countries. The state of alienation in the U.S. across sectors is such that betting on the debt backing the economy increasingly super- sedes outright investment in real commodities. Sudden disasters don’t roll our high-end gamblers back to reality, however. Not even back to the capi- talist reality of the kinds of use value that might seem necessary to protect a system in crisis. Sociologist John Bellamy Foster and colleagues describe financialization picking up in pace during the worst of damage brought about by the pres- ent pandemic. The resulting impacts aren’t felt just in stock portfolios or bond derivatives. With less revenue from elective surgery and other blows to projected profits, U.S. hospitals, for instance, are firing nurses during the worst outbreak in a hundred years. Our S&P graph suggests that at the other end of the outbreak, even as hospitalizations are exploding in record number, with the vaccines rolling 7 On the Precipice: A Progressive Agenda in the Biden Era out and a Biden administration rolling in, things, from the vantage of cap- ital, may be looking up. Capital will survive—even prosper—through half- a-million U.S. deaths its professional-managerial class largely dodged by staying at home. So we may have here a positive bias later in the outbreak. Terrible news on the daily doesn’t depress stocks now that the bourgeoisie appears in the clear. Here, then, we find ourselves back at the vulgar interpretation we thought we’d circumvent in favor of nuance. Because the rest of the U.S. is in ter- rible shape. Three-to-four times more of the population is hungry than an already unconscionable baseline. Millions have filed for inadequate un- employment insurance. Shoplifting of staples like food and diapers is at record levels. Tens of thousands of COVID deaths, more than that of many countries combined, have been attributed to housing evictions alone. The overall trend apparent even in our rough graph from March to December—up, up, up—supersedes the dynamics of the stock market’s blips here and there. The resulting massacre—COVID and otherwise—is teaching Americans an abject lesson, at least for those in a position to as- similate it. The extreme center’s gambit The lesson can be so easily lost. The tumult of a political class at odds with itself forces the country to choose sides that are not of its own making. The hard part is not letting January’s Trumpist putsch and the second im- peachment that followed confuse matters. Certainly these histories count and defeating the fascist creep is always a front-and-center task. The roiling itself speaks to the bourgeoisie’s struggles with administering an empire in decline home and abroad. But we need to keep in mind that politicians of both major parties— Democratic and Republican—spent this past year organizing themselves around simultaneously bailing out billionaires, now far richer than ever in only a few short months, and minimizing paying the poorest of Americans trying to survive a deadly pandemic. Congress passed a lousy $1200 of assistance per American earlier in 2020. It then dragged its ass for months at the end of the year before finally agreeing on another $600. A push to up the second payout to $2000 was 8 Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office turned aside in the name of fiscal responsibility. The debate was cut off with a vote in favor of a military budget greater than the world’s next ten largest military budgets combined.