People going around claiming the Democrats are neoliberal immediately after they leaned super hard into unions is some serious gaslighting horseapples.
they leaned super hard into unions
Biden supported unions before and after the railway workers strike, but Biden still felt the need to kill the strike. Supporting unions enough so that they get incrementally better deals is pro-union, but it does not a progressive make. We need radical systemic change to our institutions and Biden is ideologically incapable of delivering on that for the economy, the Ukraine War, Israel’s genocide, climate change, or immigration to name a few.
You never paid attention to the follow up on this one did you?
the reason the strike was killed was because it was “thousands of working people vs millions of working people”. The Democrats voted to insert the contested item (sick leave) and the republicans blocked that vote (Which had to be separate because stupid legislative rules).
However the Biden administration kept fighting in the background for the unions to get their sick leave, and eventually won. The unions even posted articles celebrating Biden getting them their sick leave.
that situation was a complex one and a reminder to not view the world in black and white.
that situation was a complex one and a reminder to not view the world in black and white.
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
There is little evidence that the current administration has any interest in dealing with this crisis. Our hope is that a Biden administration would be historically bold. But make no mistake that both our political and economic systems will collapse absent solutions that scale to the enormous size of the problem. The central goal of our nation’s economic policy must be nothing less than the doubling of median income. We must dramatically narrow inequality between distributions while eliminating racial and gender inequalities within them. This is the standard to which we should hold leaders from both parties. To advocate for anything less would be cowardly or dishonest or both.
The 1% have extracted 50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90%. It’s time we side with labor in no uncertain terms.
the reason the strike was killed was because it was “thousands of working people vs millions of working people”.
The second reason Phillips-Fein finds the labor fight compelling is because of the way Biden framed it, as a choice between the interests of railway workers and the economy as a whole. But he didn’t have to do that. “The president could also embrace a sensibility that more explicitly identifies the interests of the country as a whole with those of the workers and their unions, rather than seeing them in opposition,” she said.
Biden is a pro-union neoliberal. We need pro-union progressives and socialists with a populist narrative to campaign on.
