Eisenberg's 240-page book contains six parts -- Democracy; Environment; Finance and Economy; Foreign Policy; Justice; and, Social Policy -- with 109 discrete entries. Eisenberg's responses to the Obama/Biden social and foreign policy decisions take up almost half the book. In his introduction Eisenberg writes, "President Barack Obama left a lingering bad taste in the mouths of many progressives who had high hopes for his administration." One can't help but think of that scene from the wildly successful film, Shawshank Redemption. The willing Left swallowed what he gave them (NTTAWWT). Eisenberg adds, "The number of progressive changes under the Obama-Biden administration were meager indeed."
It's simpler for the former VP; Eisenberg merely states the staggering: "As for Vice President Joe Biden, his 50-year career in politics is marked by a hawkish stance on both foreign policy and crime." 50 years? And what does he have to show for it? In Hollow Resistance, Paul Street pointed out what we suspected:
Here it is worth recalling that the blunderer Biden wouldn't be on the national political stage in 2020 but for Obama's decision to choose the twice-failed presidential candidate to be his running mate in 2008.
The twice-failed Lesser Evil is now called upon to save the Empire. Wait a minute, that's a question.
Reading Eisenberg's itemized 'balance sheet' can be done straight-through in a few hours -- just keep a bunker-mentality pistol handy as the depression settles in. Or you could read it all over a few days and increase your chances of surviving the disillusionment. Or you could center on areas of critical importance and read the other bits on the toilet more at your leisure. This is not a hit on the book; I know folks who have read War and Peace, in increments, on the crapper, and flush pages they read, so that a month in there's nothing left but the cover of the disenboweled tome you've read. Hmph.
Now, recently Chomsky said there are three areas of threat to the survival of the human species -- areas that our present and future presidents (if we have any more after Uncle Joe) must pay attention to if we are to survive as a species: nuclear war, climate change, and the seeming global demise of democracy. Nuclear winter would kill us quickly; climate change will kill us slowly; and the end of democracy, after we've gotten so used to believing that our voices matter, would make us all wish we were dead and we might be willing to help each other get there. In addition to these global concerns, another subset of issues in Eisenberg's book, specific to America, are racial injustice and continuing economic inequality. Naturally, they are all related issues.
We can breathe easier knowing that one of the first things Uncle Joe after being sworn in as the one who presides over our democracy was to extend the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia. This offers a modicum of stability. But as Eisenberg points out, instead of continuing to move down a path that sees us eliminate nukes altogether one day, as Obama promised, he chose to spend more money on them:
Of all the disappointments to progressives wrought by the Obama-Biden administration, this trillion-dollar earmark vies for most egregious. The United States possesses more than six thousand nuclear warheads today, enough to destroy humanity several times over. Yet modernization is decreed a priority, a modernization, mind you, that flagrantly violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
This is something Biden will continue to pursue, along with our countervailing good buds the Russians.
The Doomsday Clock is now set at 100 seconds. In his recent book, The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg made two cogent points that have gone ignored but are relevant to Eisenberg's point. One, says Ellsberg, we don't need ICBMs any longer; they are no longer efficient, now that so many nukes are mobile and strategic, and they are little more than targets in the heartland. Agreeing with Russians to dismantle them would immediately set us back on a course of diminished risk for starting a war that will end in species-ending nuclear winter. And, we need to revisit, says Ellsberg, our first-strike posture, one that, if executed, would lead to China being bombed too -- even if they weren't direct belligerents, because, the policy suggests, as with Terrorism, that we are targeting not a country but an abstract noun: Communism. Today, the Chinese are far more likely to beat us at our own game -- capitalism -- than by a red menace. A new policy should reflect that reality. But for now, Biden is continuing Obama's nuke policy, a net negative on Eisenberg's balance sheet.
As with nukes, Biden begins his term with a symbolic gesture toward tackling the Climate Change catastrophe ahead. He has immediately signed back onto the Paris Agreement, but many critics of the accord say that it's largely toothless; there are no enforcement gears in place -- just a lot of photo-opped good will that "we" hope to alchemically change into selflessness. Eisenberg points to a few climate-saving initiatives that the Obama/Biden administration mishandled. The biggest dungbuggery was the Solyndra project. Eisenberg writes,
Solyndra was the poster child for the Obama administration's purported attempt to create new jobs in the emerging field of clean energy by injecting it with billions of dollars in taxpayer-backed stimulus funds.
Feel-Good hugs all around. Yes We Can. Hopey Dopey, rah-rah-rah. Look again.
It was a colossal failure. What was supposed to lead us all to the promised land of a green new land of lean clean job opportunities blew up:
Six months afterward, Solyndra announced the layoffs of about 180 employees. In September 2011, less than a year since Obama's visit, Solyndra shut its doors, fired 1,100 workers, and announced it was filing for bankruptcy, leaving taxpayers bearing the cost of $535 million in loan guarantees.
Wall Street, as it turns out, was one of the major beneficiaries of the collapse of Solyndra. Eisenberg writes, "As just one example, Cogentrix, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., received a $90 million guarantee through the program." As an indicator of any serious government initiative to alleviate environmental degradation the Solyndra debacle was/is a microcosm of the cynicism and corruption of state-corporate partnerships. On the Eisenberg Scale it is another negative calculation in the category of crucial needs.
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