[Peace-discuss] By November, Let’s Make Biden the Harold Macmillan of Imperial Commitment Shedding

[J.B. Nicholson]

Robert Naiman via Peace-discuss wrote:
> Note what I haven’t said here, anywhere. I have not encouraged anyone to
> vote for Joe Biden. I have not encouraged anyone to vote against Joe Biden.
> I have been Switzerland on that question here.

I don't think you had to say that explicitly, it's implied in getting Joe Biden to 
have the power he'd need to carry out your plan. This means you're shifting from an 
explicit call to vote for Biden (which you can't afford particularly posting to a 
peace group) to an implicit call to vote for him.

You're asking people to trade away the only thing they have -- their vote -- in 
exchange for doing things he's already pledged not to do like support Medicare for 
All (which Biden has already pledged to veto if it came to him as POTUS per 
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/10/biden-says-he-wouldd-veto-medicare-for-all-as-coronavirus-focuses-attention-on-health.html) 
which is also something the Democratic Party also apparently will fight to disallow.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not brought any Medicare for All bill to the floor of 
the House. Other Democrats therefore get to carry on with their hypocrisies like AOC 
talking to the public and to shamefully uncritical journalists like Amy Goodman about 
how much we need individual payments from the government after she likely voted for 
the CARES Act (which was a big business bailout bill). Or Democrats taking HMO money 
and chatting up Medicare for All while depending on Pelosi to never call them to 
account for that.

There's no real reason to think that we need Biden in office to effect the 
majoritarian changes we need to see. What we need isn't partisan calls to action 
benefiting one of the two 1% parties over the other. What we need is a practical 
strategy organizing around a specific set of actionable goals including (but not 
limited to) enacting Medicare for All. I don't have such a plan to hand, but I think 
the increased immiseration brought on by both 1% parties will help focus people's 
time and put aside such ridiculous distraction as wondering who is better, Trump or 
Biden.

The Democrats don't care if Biden wins. It's likely that either Trump or Biden will 
be the next POTUS and either way the elites get what they want -- a reliable neocon & 
neolib in Biden (now with obviously decreased mental capacity) or Trump who has been 
(to borrow a phrase) brought to heel by years of Russiagate. An organized public will 
need to challenge whomever occupies the White House.

> Even if we go hide in a cave for the next seven months, the odds are good that Joe
> Biden will be the next President of the United States.
This is an evidenceless claim. Polling on the election is almost meaningless right 
now but if one insists on reading something into such polling which currently puts 
Biden a few points ahead of Trump, it's worth noting that Hillary Clinton had higher 
poll ratings at this point than Biden does. What stands out to most voters is what 
happened in 2016 where most establishment-friendly news outlets gave Hillary Clinton 
odds on being the winner and yet Donald Trump was duly elected instead (for reasons 
the establishment-friendly media won't dare get into hence we get endless Russiagate 
lies). We've yet to see a proper reckoning and apology for such obviously shoddy 
reporting from so many outlets, or giving credit where credit is due to those few who 
accurately predicted that Trump would win (one exception is local News from Neptune 
guest Ed Mandel who accurately predicted Trump's win and has rightly received credit 
for his correct assessment on-air).

> In the opening innings of the fight he led towards universal health insurance,
> Barack Obama said: the health insurance companies have to be at the table.
In other words, Obama did not fight for making our current single-payer Medicare 
system universal (covering all Americans). He fought for the HMOs and won with a 
healthcare plan written by the HMOs which was largely what RomneyCare offered 
(suggesting that as far as health care goes it wouldn't have mattered if Romney had 
won). Even when HR676 (the late John Conyers' Medicare for All bill) was ready to be 
brought to the floor of the House for a vote and when the Democrats had a majority in 
the House & Senate we didn't get Medicare for All. The situation we see with Medicare 
for All bills is indistinguishable from the HMOs recognizing that having such bills 
written and ready to bring to the floor is a prerequisite distraction for continuing 
to let HMOs dictate US healthcare delivery.