President Joe Biden

I’ve had to remove a few paragraphs of praise for the president from this post. I’m a sucker for good rhetoric, like most, and I must have been drinking the night he gave this speech. It sounded good at the time.

I heard today he’s sending troops to Ukraine. He’s pulling them from Afghanistan, they say, and sending them to Ukraine. I haven’t heard him say that but that is what was reported. And it’s believable, we’ll see. Until then, I’m retracting my praise of honesty and sincerity and will revert to calling him and the democrats the lesser of two evils.

Still, just by claiming he’s in opposition to the enemies of democracy, Joe becomes a hero in this narrative. That is an important distinction between the two parties. The democrats do their best to tell the truth and hide their lies, republicans don’t. The republicans will pretend they told the truth even when they know everybody else knows they are lying.

They don’t care.
 
The problem, as deceptively sold by the republican rebuttal, is the opposition doesn’t like democracy. It’s almost comical to watch republicans pretend that they do, or ever have. I won’t pretend to believe their opinions deserve any serious consideration because their past tells their truth. Their ideology has been supremacy for a long time.
 
It must be noted though, the rewriting of history to pretend somehow that the Trump admin was worse than his republican predecesors, because of the Big Lie, or whatever reason they want to come up with, is ridiculous. We’ll get back to that another day. The republicans have been consistently antidemocratic for a very long time. You can bank on them staying that way. All of them. It’s what they do.
 
The corporate lizards actually believe they earn their money, deservedly, and comparatively, as a form of meritocratic reward for their talents and extra efforts. They earned it by working hard, they believe. The idea that their economic relationships in a rigged economy resulted in their unfair advantage never really crosses their mind for consideration, or it’s quickly dismissed, I’m sure.
 
So Joe must walk a fine line of appeasement or the opposition will get upset. And who knows what they might do? I’ll just tip-toe around all that for now and focus on the president’s address.
 
I agree with him, mostly. The first line that bothered me was when he asked why we can’t build our own electric cars and batteries. The comment is so rhetorically obvious that to not answer it ignores the decades of outsourcing that we did, and still do. As if he doesn’t know.
 
Who is responsible for that? Wall Street.
 
Any rhetorical question a politician asks regarding why we pay way more than everybody else for institutional goods and services, the answer is, blame Wall Street. That is likely the correct answer. It’s the fat-cat bankers maximizing thier own shareholder value that divides us, which forces our elected officials to serve them, instead of the public. 
 
Joe has so many grand ideas. We’re going to cure cancer he says, and create blue collar jobs with unions and have a minimum wage. He should have added, guaranteed for all, but he didn’t. Employment should be guaranteed, imo.
 
The Family Plan, he says, guarantees four more years of public education. I think it’s a good idea but it won’t pass. None of it will. So why not go for it and dream big. We want publicly funded credentialed curriculum accessible to everybody as part of our citizen network, which also allows citizens to vote and pay taxes as simply and conveniently as technology can provide.
 
Joes’ family plan also promises subsidized child care and tax credits, he says, which is all good, but that could also be better, imo. If the free market makes childcare too expensive compared to a parent’s wage, then the free market is inadequate, and in need of correction.
 
The economy is rigged to make some people’s time way more valuable than others. That inequality is what needs to be corrected for an ethical economy. If we can fix our democracy, we can fix our economy.
 
Why don’t we negotiate drug prices? That question always gets an applause but, like our economy, the problem is never fixed. We pay three times as much as other countries for our drugs. Why is that?
 
You should know this. The answer was six paragraphs back.