A Dozen Big Reasons to Vote for Joe Biden

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There are dozens of reasons to vote for Biden over Trump, big and small. Here are an even dozen big ones, some framed in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere:

1. Trump Lies. According to the Washington Post, Trump has made more than 20,000 false or misleading statements in less than three years, six months in office. You can’t trust anything he says, including that Covid-19 will just “go away,” or that anyone who needs a test can get one (let alone get the results in time to trace contacts).

Trump is doing his damnedest to create a society where the most convincing liar wins. Do we want our kids and grandkids to accept this as normal?

2. For a leader of a great nation, Trump says astonishingly stupid things. He believes that nations like China pay the tariffs that he’s imposed on their imports into this country. They don’t. Our own people and businesses pay for them, as they pay the increased prices for tariffed goods. Trump has recommended that we cure cases of Covid-19 by injecting ourselves with disinfectants like bleach, or somehow shining sunlight on the cells inside our lungs and bodies.

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.” In his daily disjointed ramblings, untutored by experts or even his own briefing papers, Trump routinely removes all doubt. In the process, he lets our enemies laugh at our expense, while our people and our allies quake in embarrassment and fear for their futures.

Is there any wonder why Trump has gone to astonishing lengths to conceal his college grades and test scores? Can a man with his intelligence ever hope to compete with bent but smart leaders like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, let alone Angela Merkel?

3. Trump and his GOP have done little or nothing to create good jobs for workers. There’s a really simple way to do that, which I noted on this blog four months after Trump took office. For about a decade, we’ve had to invest at least two trillion dollars in our national infrastructure to make it safe, let alone to bring it up to global standards. You can’t outsource building roads, bridges, sewers, pure-water systems and the like to China or Mexico; this work has to be done here at home. So a simple two-trillion-dollar infrastructure-building bill would put tens of millions of skilled and unskilled workers in good, reliable, useful jobs, right away. But instead of investing our tax money on infrastructure and good jobs in rebuilding it, Trump spent $1.5 trillion on tax cuts, more than half of which went to the top 20% of earners. Doesn’t that reveal his priorities? Watch what he does, not what he says!

4. Employer-based health insurance helps bosses dominate working people. Why do we have one of the worst systems for health-insurance among developed nations? And why do we pay almost twice the norm for it? Is all this just a sorry accident, an unfortunate but innocent mistake?

Not hardly. Our private, employer-based health insurance system makes people’s health depend on their jobs and their bosses. You may have a job with a bullying, unfair boss, and you may hate it. But you have to keep it because—if you have employer health insurance—your family’s ability to go to a doctor and stay healthy (or alive) depends on your job. Millions of workers feel this insecurity much more acutely now: they’ve lost their jobs and health insurance to the pandemic, so they lack health care even as contagion rages around them.

5. Trump and his GOP support a health-insurance system that enriches shareholders and mostly white-collar workers of private insurance companies. Now that millions have no health insurance in the middle of a pandemic, we’re all beginning to understand just how dysfunctional is a system based on employer-provided health insurance. Someone must benefit from this fiasco, or we would have dumped it long ago. But who?

The insurers’ shareholders and white-collar workers gain from our impossibly inefficient, multiply duplicative system of hundreds of private insurance companies. The shareholders reap the private profit. Management and white-collar workers have jobs managing the vast multiplication of forms, approvals, rules, plans, denials, computer systems, websites and complexity, as compared to any efficient single-payer system. These folks “win” by collecting dividends and pushing unnecessary paper for high salaries.

Trump’s GOP has relentlessly supported this unnecessarily complex and wildly unfair system—which also renders American businesses less competitive abroad. In trying to crush every alternative, including “Obamacare”, is the GOP supporting the shareholding class and white-collar paper-pushers over the vast majority of Americans? You decide.

6. Trump wants to get rid of “Obamacare,” leaving the 23 million people who depend on it for health care uninsured in the middle of a pandemic. His administration is pressing a lawsuit for that very purpose even now. Can you think of anything more cruel and counterproductive than trying to deprive 23 million of our people of the economic ability to see a doctor or go to a hospital right now? If that weren’t enough, a by-product of killing “Obamacare” would be to let insurance companies stop covering pre-existing conditions again.

7. Trump and his GOP are all about domination. That’s their way of life. In his lifelong “in your face” style, Trump is just a bit more up front about it than the rest of the GOP. He tries to dominate others by lies, fraud, bullying, lawsuits, stonewalling, insults, demeaning nicknames, and fomenting hate and division. He also wants an all-powerful executive, more like a king than a president. He wants a hamstrung Congress, that can’t even question him with subpoenas, and a compliant judiciary that will let him grab kingly power. He wants whites to dominate non-whites. He wants bosses to dominate workers. He wants native-born (except for so-called “anchor babies”) to dominate immigrants. He wants a class-based society formed along economic and racial lines. How can you tell? By his actions and his words. The next four points elaborate a few specifics.

8. Trump’s labor policies are all about bosses dominating workers. Union-busting didn’t begin with Trump and surely won’t end with him. But the lackeys he’s installed in the Department of Labor and on the National Labor Relations Board are among the most hostile to labor and labor unions in a generation. Their hostility doesn’t even matter so much anymore, because so-called “right to work” laws, starting in the South, have already destroyed much of the progress, power and economic gains that workers made through unionization during the middle of the twentieth century. The only way to begin to reverse this decades-long trend is to put Biden, with his deep working-class roots, in the White House.

9. The “gig economy” is busy creating a whole new class of serfs for Trump’s social class to dominate. Neither Trump nor his lackeys seem to understand gigs well, because they are mostly technologically unsophisticated. But they all know that their social “peers,” the new Internet oligarchs, are making out like bandits. They also sense instinctively how “nicely” (from the bosses’ perspective) the gig economy turns once-protected employees into yet another class of serfs.

Gig-workers’ serfdom begins with legal name-calling. They are not “employees,” but so-called “independent contractors.” By virtue of that simple name-calling and its legal consequences, they have none of the rights that employees have fought hard for, through unionization and political organizing, since before FDR’s New Deal.

They don’t have regular hours. They don’t get paid vacations, health insurance, family or sick leave, or other benefits. They get paid only for the hours they are actually working, after deduction of commissions and other expenses. And drivers for Uber and other gig-transport firms also have to take care of their own vehicle’s expenses: gasoline, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, etc. Many other gig workers also have no control over their hours whatsoever, but are told when to report for work the night before, or even after they wake up.

We call all this “technology,” part of the “miracle” of the Internet. And, yes, it does make hourly allocation of labor more “efficient” in the abstract. Uber and Lyft, for example, seem more available and affordable than did antiquated taxi and truck-transport systems.

But what’s the essence of the “gig” economy? Is it the speed, efficiency and precise logistics that the Internet provides? Or is it the process of making human workers cogs in an algorithm, working all alone, without any of the benefits or entitlements that labor achieved through a vast social struggle over most of the last century? You decide. If you think the essence and power of the “gig” economy is commodifying workers dominated by algorithms that profit the oligarchs, and so creating a whole new class of digital serfs, and if you fear that you might be the next worker so commodified and algorithmized, you know for whom to vote.

10. Trump and the GOP are maintaining a class of eleven million serfs. We have that many undocumented immigrants living and working in our country right now. Without them, our economy would grind to a halt. Now, during the pandemic, they are working in risky jobs, often with inadequate protection from Covid-19. As a result, they are getting sicker and dying at higher than the “normal” rate for workers, creating an infection risk for the rest of us.

Trump claims he wants to deport them all, but he hasn’t and he won’t. Obama in fact deported more undocumented immigrants.

Why is this so? For two generations, the GOP has had it both ways. It has used undocumented immigrants as a political punching bag, knowing that many Americans can be made to fear them as “strange” and “foreign” and possible competitors for jobs. Yet they do essential jobs for pay and under conditions that few American citizens can tolerate. The GOP also knows that workers who have no papers and fear deportation and breakup of their families will be meek and docile. They won’t organize unions. They won’t protest low pay or unsafe working conditions because they fear being rounded up by ICE and shipped out at any time.

So the GOP’s business wing maintains the eleven million as a permanent underclass of peasant workers. Their families sometimes live among us for generations, working and paying taxes. But they have no rights, no visas, and no citizenship. They are fearful and humble because they can be deported at any time, for any reason or no reason, simply because they don’t have papers. They fear being sent “back” to countries that they have forgotten and that have forgotten them.

The GOP and Trump like it this way because these fearful immigrants pick our fruits and vegetables, slaughter our animals, and pack our meat at low pay and without making trouble. They are modern, twenty-first-century serfs. But the rest of us have to ask: “Is this America? Is their serfdom compatible with democracy?”

11. Trump wants to dominate, not just govern, our own people, by force if necessary. He used force—accompanied by our new SecDef, Mark Esper, no less—to clear the streets around Lafayette Plaza of peaceful protesters for a propaganda stunt and photo op. He has referred to the largely peaceful protests after the murder of George Floyd as reasons to “dominate” the streets. He has called their participants “anarchists” and “agitators.”

Without local authorization, Trump has sent federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security, who are supposed to be concerned with our borders, deep into our hinterlands to detain suspected protestors, without probable cause, in unmarked vehicles. Trump has sent them deliberately into cities with Democratic mayors, against the mayors’ wishes.

These actions seem wholly contrary to the spirit and structure of our Constitution, the roles of our National Guard and governors, and the customs and traditions of relations between the federal government and our states developed over the centuries. But it’s all so shockingly unprecedented as to require a trip to the Supreme Court for a definitive ruling. That Court is out of session until the first Monday in October, so it won’t have ruled by November 3.

Your vote on Trump’s quest for domination matters, lest it continue for another four years and become a habit. If you have trouble making up your mind, you might want to read Tom Friedman’s op-ed Wednesday, which likens what Trump is doing here to Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad’s playbook for turning a once-prosperous country into a Land of Graves and Rubble.

12. Trump acts like a king and appears to think like one. He has actually said, as president, that the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want.” He has pushed the envelope of legitimate presidential power entirely out of shape, (1) by coercing and attempting to extort foreign leaders for his own personal political advantage; (2) by stone-walling subpoenas from legitimate state criminal authorities and from Congress; (3) by refusing to appear before Congress and ordering his minions not to; and (4) by taking acts of war, including the assassination by drone of Iran’s General Soleimani, with questionable authority kept secret even from Congress. (I agreed with taking out Soleimani, but doing so could have started a war. So it should have been done in accordance with law and sound military advice, not by the secret whim of one man.)

If you think this list reads a bit like the list of “whereases” in our Declaration of Independence, you’re on the right track. Those were reasons for rejecting the rule of King George III and founding an independent nation. This is only a partial list of Trump’s transgressions of law, custom and generally accepted governmental operating procedures. But they’re enough to give you an idea of how close we stand today to the dilemma of our nation’s birth: subjection to domination versus independence and equality.

* * *

You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned Joe Biden much so far. The reason is simple. Biden is normal and obeys the law. Trump is not normal and tries to make his own law. Biden is sane. Trump is a self-obsessed sociopath with a narcissist personality disorder. Biden has a humble and realistic self-image; he doesn’t see himself as a “very stable genius.” Trump appears to think that he’s the only one who knows anything. He slants most everything toward his own personal interest, takes advice (if at all) at random, and doesn’t regularly read his briefing papers.

Like most good leaders, Biden will assemble a team of very smart people, even smarter than he. And unlike Trump’s team, they’ll be competent people, with expertise and experience (not just money), from every racial and ethnic background.

If you feel that domination by someone as careless, stupid and selfish as Trump is the way out of our troubles, by all means vote for him. If you liked the image of George Floyd pinned down by his neck, with his hands cuffed behind him, about to be murdered by knee, go ahead. (Why would anyone vote for his or her own domination, or domination of fellow Americans? Beats me. Fox and Rush must be really good propagandists.)

If you want an America free from domination and a return to normalcy and decency, you’ve got to vote for Joe, and no one else.

Voting for anyone else is throwing away your vote and helping Trump. Some of us tried that before, with dismal results. Some voted for Ralph Nader instead of Al Gore, or for Gary Johnson instead of Hillary Clinton. So we got Dubya, who started the two longest unnecessary wars in our history, one of which strove vainly to do what Obama did with two helicopters and a team of Navy Seals. Then, in 2016, voters for Gary Johnson helped put Trump over the top.

So this time there’s only one choice for sane and normal people not reconciled to domination, whether by Trump, bosses or whites, as a principle of society: vote for Joe Biden and every Democrat on your ballot.

Normalcy may seem unexciting. That’s especially so after we’ve gone through three-plus years of “exciting” sick showmanship, incessant titilliating (but mostly false) Tweets, and national delirium.

But we must soon awake from our fever-dream, wracked as it’s been by the incessant, grating, discordant voice of one man focused entirely on himself. When that nightmare finally passes, when a normal person takes charge again and lets worthy others into the room, we will all feel euphoria—and the love of life and normalcy—just like survivors of Covid-19.

Footnote: Based on careful estimates of lifetime taxation, “The richest 1 percent received 9.3 percent of the total tax cuts, the top 5 percent got 26.5 percent, the top quintile received 52.2 percent and the bottom quintile got 3.3 percent.” Laurence Kotlikoff, Forbes Magazine (July 19, 2019).

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