Joe Biden has now announced his transition team and a number of his cabinet appointees, giving us some idea of how he can be expected to govern. It’s very much true that “personnel is policy” and that the records of the people he chooses for key roles can indicate what kind of president he intends to be.
How are the picks so far? Well, the bad news for progressives is that there has not yet been a single person announced that the left can be enthusiastic about. The best that can be said of the nominees is that they are generally “not as bad as we might have feared”. Some of the choices are deeply concerning. Others border on the unobjectionable. Most are relatively predictable, as Biden is making it clear he intends to hew as closely as possible to the Democratic politics of the Obama years. Here are a few worthy of note.
Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, is one of the Obama veterans, having previously served as deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state. Blinken is a card-carrying member of what is sometimes called the “Blob”, the DC foreign policy establishment, which has a consensus set of beliefs that the US must remain a dominant global power, and a willingness to use military force to maintain that power.
Blinken previously broke with Biden to support the (disastrous) armed intervention in Libya and has argued that Israel should keep receiving colossal amounts of US military aid even if it refuses to honor international agreements. (He also suggested that the US would never publicly criticize the Israeli government.) Blinken’s statement that diplomacy needs to be “supplemented by deterrence” is a sign that he will have little interest in reining in the sprawling US global military empire, and his statements about “undermining” and “isolating” Russia suggest we could see an increase in the cold war-type rhetoric that has been gaining such an alarming foothold in the Democratic party.
In fact, at a recent Aspen Security Forum discussion, Blinken favorably quoted from the cold warrior George F Kennan, who argued that the Soviet Union was inherently expansionist and needed to be dealt with through “containment”. Blinken said Kennan’s worldview was “eerily up to the moment”, though Kennan’s views escalated the tensions that nearly led to nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Blinken’s appointment is taken as a sign that “internationalism is back” in the White House, but it’s an internationalism that divides the world into America’s allies and its rivals.
Janet Yellen as treasury secretary offers little to complain about, though it is notable that Biden did not heed calls to put a trust-buster like Elizabeth Warren in the role. Yellen is a highly respected academic economist and former Federal Reserve chair who is relatively apolitical, and her appointment has excited other Democratic economists including Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman. Even the socialist economic analyst Doug Henwood says Biden “could have done a lot worse” than Yellen. The good news about Yellen is that she is not an advocate of austerity policies and has spoken of the need for the government to extend “extraordinary fiscal support” during the pandemic.
The appointment of John Kerry as special envoy for climate is perhaps Biden’s way of signaling that he takes climate change seriously – as Democrats up until now tragically have not. I say it’s “Biden’s way” because it’s not necessarily a good way to show a commitment to taking serious action on climate – Kerry has “stature” and “experience”, and, thank God, actually does believe in the reality of climate change (unlike the present administration). But he is also known as a man long on words and short on actions. Even worse, Kerry favors an approach to dealing with climate change that rests on commodifying and selling nature rather than preserving it as our common inheritance.
He recently published an op-ed explaining “how to better tackle climate change” which focused entirely on nudging the free market into putting a price on carbon. Nothing about how to deal with the equity effects of carbon pricing (ie making sure the financial burden doesn’t end up falling on the poor). Nothing about the federal government taking action to convert the electric grid, shutting down fossil fuel-reliant power stations, and investing in renewable energy. Nothing about a Green New Deal. And given Kerry’s record of defending the expansion of US fossil fuel production under Obama, he’s very unlikely to get tough on the companies most responsible for the problem. Climate activists should be incredibly concerned by the appointment of Kerry, who may acknowledge that the problem exists, but will almost certainly attempt phony business-friendly “solutions” and half-measures. It will require a huge fight to get the Biden administration to take real action.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
