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India’s Police: An Instrument of Injustice
When Alexander the Great marched into Phrygian, the capital of Gordinium, in 333 BC, he was told that an oracle had declared that any man who could unravel the Gordian knot — deemed impossible to untangle — would rule over Asia. After wrestling with the knot for a time with no success, Alexander drew his sword and cut the knot into half with a single stroke. To paraphrase the Bard of Avon, police reforms in India await a similar creative solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem.
360˚ Context: The State of the Indian Republic
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It is ironic that, more than seven decades after independence, the police in India are still governed by the Indian Police Act of 1861. The British introduced this act immediately after what they called the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. As per the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the 1861 legislation was enacted with “the purpose of crushing dissent and any movement for self government.” After the 1857 uprising, the British monarchy took over from the East India Company, creating a colonial administrative architecture that would become the jewel in its crown. Along with the 1861 act, the 1860 Indian Penal Code was a major pillar of the new criminal justice system that served London well until India’s independence in 1947.
The Legacy of the Raj
Independent India adopted a new constitution that gave states jurisdiction over the police. Henceforth, it was not New Delhi but state capitals that controlled policing. However, those who drafted the constitution failed to craft legislation to create a new police force in tune with the new demands of democracy. The police force retained its colonial character, carrying the will of its new political masters. Order ordained by these masters had to be maintained. The rule of law and due process were to play second fiddle.
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.custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}Like many former colonies, India became a democracy in form while its police force remained colonial in spirit. In the first few decades after independence, the combination of enlightened leaders, ignorant public opinion, some outstanding officers and the broad hegemony of one political party papered over the incongruity of the arrangement. That could not, and did not, last.
From the 1960s, Indian politics became increasingly fractious. By the mid-1970s, the pulls and pressures on police departments, thanks to political interference, increased dramatically. Inadequate organizational structure, exploitative ethos and brutal behavior came to typify the police force. In 1975, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, used the police to impose a state of emergency on the country. As in colonial times, the police suppressed civil liberties, foisted false cases on the ruling party’s political opponents and even enforced sterilization on unwilling young men under a draconian family planning plan.
In 1977, the opposition won a historic victory. Immediately after taking power, the new government instituted the National Police Commission (NPC) to review India’s system of policing and suggest reforms. It produced eight reports, including a Model Police Act, between 1979 and 1981. It also appointed a commission of inquiry under a retired chief justice of India, J.C. Shah. Its 1978 report chronicled the excesses, malpractices and misdeeds of the government during the emergency. It found that the police had obediently and brutally carried out instructions of its political masters, cowing the country into submission.
To date, these reports have been gathering dust. Governments have come and gone since 1981. They have implemented peripheral recommendations but ignored substantive ones that relate to accountability and autonomy.
Echoes Across the Country
In 2020, the police are still bound by diktats of the political bosses. The Delhi riots earlier this year prompted allegations of political interference, a repeat of what happened in the 1984 unrest. It moved Julio Ribeiro, one of the country’s most respected police officers, to write a letter to the police chief of Delhi. He asked for a fair probe into the riots and questioned why the police did not investigate members of the ruling party for delivering hate speeches.
Ribeiro’s question can be echoed across the country. The chief ministers of India’s 28 states control the police just as British governors once did. Politicians pay lip service to police reforms but are unable to let go of the power they wield. At its essence, there is a fundamental asymmetry of power between the police and the citizens: The former are not accountable to the latter. The police answer only to their political and bureaucratic bosses.
The failure of politicians to reform the police has led to citizens and retired senior police officers appealing to the judiciary for change. In 2006, the Supreme Court of India passed a landmark judgment and gave seven clear directives. The government of India and its federal counterparts in state capitals were supposed to implement these directives. Instead, most have been ignored or implemented half-heartedly. As a result, many a chief justice had lamented that not a single state government is willing to cooperate: What’s to be done?
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The power politicians wield in various state capitals comes from Section 3 of the 1861 Police Act, which states: “The superintendence of the police throughout a general police-district shall vest in and shall be exercised by the State Government to which such district is subordinate, and except as authorized under the provisions of this Act, no person, officer of Court shall be empowered by the State Government to supersede or control any police functionary.”
Simply put, chief ministers and their consiglieres, the senior officers of the elite Indian Administrative Service and Indian Police Service (IPS), control every district in their states. The Model Police Act drafted by the NPC more than four decades ago recommended a tempering of this unfettered power of state governments. Its Section 39 provides for the state government to “exercise its superintendence … in such manner … as to promote the professional efficiency of the police.”
The Second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) set up by the Indian government concluded that the proposed Section 39 was insufficient to provide police autonomy. Informal and often illegal instructions to the police are pervasive. It recommended that an amendment to the Model Police Act that expressly forbade illegal or mala fide demands from the police. It also recommended that obstruction of justice be categorized as an offense. Needless to say, the government of India is yet to accept the ARC’s recommendations, let aside implement them.
Crime Pays
This politics-police equation is completely lopsided, with India’s law enforcement the handmaiden of the politicians in power. This has been supported by numerous committees such as the one headed by Justice K.T. Thomas and scholars like Milan Vaishav. In fact, Indian voters have been increasingly electing politicians who face criminal proceedings against them. Money and muscle play a growing role in Indian politics. The result is decline, if not collapse, of the policing and criminal justice system.
After 73 years of independence, the formal institutions left behind by the British Raj are weakening. For ambitious politicians, controlling the police is an important way to secure benefits for themselves, consolidate electoral gains and distribute benefits to their supporters. If politicians control the police, they can avoid criminal investigations into their activities. They can hobble opponents with false or frivolous charges. They can also dispense patronage to their core supporters who are often members of their community. This partisan use of the police furthers identity politics in an increasingly divided land. As a result, the rule of law suffers and the Indian state weakens.
The police force itself has become politicized in many if not all states. Caste, community or religious affinity is often more important than professionalism, diligence or excellence. Many politicians try to recruit members of their own group into the police. Since police officers have job security, this social engineering of the police can institutionalize the coercive power of a group long after their politician is voted out.
The Indian police have been weighed, measured and found wanting on numerous occasions. In 1992, the police stood by as a mob demolished the Babri Masjid mosque and, 10 years later, they did the same during the 2002 Gujarat riots. The rise in extrajudicial killings demonstrates the failure of due process of law. In 2005, the BBC reported that India’s “fake encounters” — staged confrontations between criminals and the police, where the criminals mostly end up dead — were shockingly common. During the emergency in the 1970s and in recent years, the police have stifled dissent by slapping colonial-era sedition charges.
The police continue to wield repression on the streets. Beating people arbitrarily is common. In recent years, marginalized groups such as Dalits, minorities, tribesmen and women who protest peacefully have faced increased police brutality. Paul Brass has found that governments have used “curfews as means of control, victimization, and outright violence against targeted groups rather than as devices to bring peace during violent times for the benefit of all.”
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Instrument of Injustice
In India, the police no longer have a reputation for probity or for being an instrument of justice. In fact, the insensitive, illegal, inhuman and indefensible handling of the September murder and gang rape of a Dalit girl in Hathras, a district in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, laid bare the utterly unprofessional work culture of the Indian police. Such conduct occurs with numbing regularity because the political elite is deeply invested in the status quo.
Prospects for reform seem dim. In 2003, R.K. Raghavan, a former director of the Central Bureau of Investigation, observed that the police would continue to do the politicians’ bidding unless certain basic reforms were enacted. The judiciary cannot enact these reforms — it is the politicians’ duty. Until “they look upon the police as a tool to settle political scores with their adversaries, nothing will improve.” Raghavan went on to argue that prospects for police reform were bleak “because the corruption that cuts across party lines, brings with it unanimity that the status quo should remain.”
In September 2020, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a speech to graduating IPS officers and called for a trust-based policing system. He argued that those who believe that instilling fear among the populace is the most effective policing strategy are out of sync with the march of the nation and its vibrant democracy. Modi’s actions have not matched his rhetoric.
India does not need another report or judgment. It awaits a statesman who can rise above the temptations of short-term electoral gains and work for long-term national benefits and who will not hesitate to wield the sword to cut the Gordian knot that keeps the politician and the police bound together. Only then will India have rule of law, not mere order, and justice for all instead of for a privileged few.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
Alex Acosta and the Guidelines of the Elite
Two fundamentally ambiguous events concerning the Jeffrey Epstein affair have left many people wondering how far the web of influence around the convicted sex offender extended. The first was the trial that ended with a sweetheart deal allowing Epstein, an American financier, to be virtually free while serving prison time. The second event was his apparent suicide in prison as he was awaiting trial on separate charges.
The conditions surrounding his suicide are so spectacularly equivocal that any rational person can only be dumbfounded by the uncritical acceptance by the media of New York City’s medical examiner’s declaration of suicide as definitive. CNN, for example, reporting on the most recent news concerning the 2005 trial and the sweetheart deal writes drily: “Epstein died by suicide in a federal jail in August 2019.”
Zambia Is The Economist’s Damsel in Distress
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In the article, CNN cites a review by the Department of Justice finding “that Alex Acosta, President Donald Trump’s former Labor secretary, exercised poor judgment when, as a US attorney in Florida, he gave sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein a non-prosecution agreement.” It adds that “the review did not find that Acosta or other prosecutors engaged in professional misconduct.”
The article mentions that Acosta was guilty of a second count of poor judgment “when he failed to notify the girls and young women who alleged they were sexually abused by Epstein about the decision to not prosecute the multi-millionaire on federal charges.
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Poor judgment:
The commonly attributed failing that explains why a crime committed by any member of the elite (defined as those empowered to judge the acts of others and exempt from being judged by others than their own) cannot be considered a crime since the mistake of showing poor judgment eclipses in gravity the crime itself
Contextual Note
As a federal prosecutor and then President Trump’s secretary of labor, Acosta belongs to the middle ranks of the judicial and political elite just as Epstein belonged to the middle ranks of the financial and social elite. Epstein appears also to have been associated with the international intelligence elite. That offered him supplementary security because intelligence can never be accused of crimes since its duty is to be engaged in serious criminal activity. By virtue of their belonging to the elite, both Epstein and Acosta knew they were at least theoretically protected from ever being convicted of serious crimes. But so were people like Harvey Weinstein, who belonged to the entertainment elite, or Bernie Madoff, who worked his way into the financial elite.
Epstein, Weinstein and Madoff demonstrate that it’s possible to go too far in exercising poor judgment. All three had, at some point, probably lost any notion of there being such a thing as “too far.” They thus learned they weren’t quite as elite as they imagined themselves to be.
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The Epstein case helps us to understand one important principle: that in the circles of the elite, there are always two levels of logic that protect them. The first is the phenomenon of the first offense, or the first occasion in which the subject crosses a line that could expose the nature of the game. The less timid or cautious actually push their luck to discover where that line may be before pulling back to their safety zone.
The second is the security deriving from the self-interested solidarity of the elite. They will never betray the secrets of their peers, whom they learn to protect passively. Passive protection translates as the rhetorical skill of denying even awareness of actions deemed compromising. It is important to avoid recourse to active protection, such as rising to the defense of a peer. This is frowned upon because it may raise suspicions of complicity. Individual sins can be brushed away. Collective sins require more effort.
Sexual crimes (Epstein, Weinstein) — typically individual sins, but not crimes — if found out and verified, are paradoxically the least forgivable, especially today, after the Weinstein scandal and #MeToo. Judicial crimes and crimes of political influence, such as Acosta is accused of, are easily dismissed because they are generally viewed as part of the job of balancing interests out among the elite.
Then there are serious political crimes, including war crimes. In some sense, they are the easiest to gloss over because they are motivated by “noble” (i.e., nationalistic) intentions. But because they concern public policies, they become highly visible and can draw the attention of political opponents. Protecting them becomes more complicated, requires working closely with the media and takes time.
Take the example of Elliot Abrams, President Trump’s special envoy, first for Venezuela and then for Iran. He was convicted of lying to Congress in the context of the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. He even admitted in an interview to being seriously involved in the micro-management of the Contra death squads in El Salvador. President George H.W. Bush pardoned Abrams in 1992, who continued to provide his services to George W. Bush and now Trump.
All this is public knowledge, which means mildly embarrassing but not compromising. It explains why a prominent member of President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, Kelly Magsamen, can even today justify her active collaboration with Abrams in a now-deleted 2019 tweet visible here. Defending her work with Abrams on the Trump administration’s shambolic effort to provoke regime change in Venezuela, Magsamen explains: “I worked for Elliot Abrams as a civil servant. He is a fierce advocate for human rights and democracy. Yes, he made serious professional mistakes and was held accountable. I’m a liberal but I’m also fair. We have a lot of work to do in Venezuela. We share goals.”
Goals justify everything. But mistakes happen, leading to accusations of “poor judgment.” Convictions also happen, sometimes followed by presidential pardons. That is what is called “being held accountable.” Most significantly, bygones become bygones.
The elite has a job to do and solidarity is an essential part of that job.
Historical note
The capacity of elite networks to protect their members, especially when it involves national security (i.e., the intelligence community), has always been impressive. Not only can they accomplish enormous tasks that may or may not involve serious criminal activity — from massacres of civilian populations to assassinations of political leaders and even scientists — they are particularly skillful at covering them up, delaying and distorting the perception of truth and influencing the commercial media to disseminate their version of the “truth” while characterizing all other accounts as conspiracy theories.
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.custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}Alex Acosta’s public explanations of his sweetheart deal for Jeffrey Epstein was anything but convincing, as any spectator should be able to notice. In response to the question raised by his own explanation that Epstein was an “intelligence asset,” he responded: “There’s been reporting to that effect, and let me say, there’s been reporting to a lot of effects … and I would hesitate to take this reporting as fact.” He then added: “I can’t address it directly because of our guidelines but I can tell you a lot of reporting is just going down rabbit holes.”
The strategy is impeccable. Call the issue “reporting,” meaning it could just be hearsay. Then mention that other hearsay exists, suggesting that it is all equally incredible. Then invoke “guidelines” that no one understands but everyone accepts as being crucial to our common security. The final touch consists of asking for questions from another reporter to avoid follow-up questions to one’s evasive answers.
History provides us with many examples of how the work of the elite to cover up its most public crimes produces effects that last decades and disqualify the truth, even when it finally emerges to the light of day.
Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated 52 years ago. The evidence that the bullet that killed the senator was fired by a second gunman is overwhelming. A lengthy interview half a century later with one of the forensic pathologists consulted for the autopsy (but not for the trial) not only presents that evidence but reveals how and why it was covered up at the time.
This is just one startling example of how the media continue to create enough doubt about decades-old affairs to protect the elite of the past. It appears to be part of their job protecting today’s elite. Acosta has nothing to worry about.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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How will Joe Biden reset US relations with the world? – podcast
Joe Biden will enter the White House in 2021 facing numerous domestic crises. But as Patrick Wintour explains, he cannot ignore the rest of the world
How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know
When Donald Trump took office four years ago it was with the mantra ‘America first’. International agreements were torn up, the US withdrew from commitments like the Paris climate agreement and cut its funding for the World Health Organization. Allies in Europe were scorned in favour of creating new relationships with ‘strongmen’ leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. Now, as Joe Biden prepares to enter the White House he is promising to repair damaged relations and rejoin global institutions. But as the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, tells Anushka Asthana, the next four years will not be simply spent turning the clock back on global affairs: instead Biden will forge his own foreign policy based on promoting democracy and standing up to authoritarianism. It’s a change in tone that will have ramifications too in Britain, where a Brexit deal and an orderly exit from the EU (now without the prospect of a Trump-blessed US trade deal) is becoming ever more important. More
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'Pathetic' Trump denounced over Krebs firing as campaign presses for recounts
Donald Trump was condemned by opponents on Wednesday for firing the senior official who disputed his baseless claims of election fraud, as the president pressed on with his increasingly desperate battle to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.The president’s election campaign team continued to press for recounts and investigations in battleground states where Biden has already been declared the winner, including a new request in Wisconsin for a partial recount.And there was uproar over his decision late on Tuesday, announced by tweet, to fire a federal official in charge of election security who dismissed his claims of widespread voter fraud.The firing of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) director, Christopher Krebs, was “pathetic and predictable from a president who views truth as his enemy”, senior House Democrat Adam Schiff said.Officials have declared 3 November’s contest between Trump and Biden the most secure US election ever.On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania supreme court dealt a blow to Trump’s efforts in a state Biden won by nearly 73,000 votes, saying officials did not improperly block the Trump campaign from observing the counting of mail-in ballots, as the president has claimed.In another lawsuit, led in federal court in the state by the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has not argued a case in federal court since the early 1990s when he was a prosecutor, the campaign accused Democrats of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election. No such evidence has emerged in the two weeks since the polls closed.Lawyers for the Democratic Pennsylvania secretary of state, the city of Philadelphia and several counties said the Trump campaign’s arguments lacked any constitutional basis or were rendered irrelevant by the state supreme court decision.They asked US district judge Matthew Brann to throw out the case, calling the allegations “at best, garden-variety irregularities” that would not warrant invalidating Pennsylvania results.The next day, the Trump campaign requested a partial recount in Wisconsin, which Biden won by around 20,000 votes, while in Georgia, which the Democrat won by around 15,000, a hand recount continued towards a midnight deadline.CNN, for one, has declared Biden the winner in Georgia.Neither state was thought likely to flip – and even if they did, their 26 electoral votes combined would not be enough to keep Trump in the White House, requiring a further reverse in Pennsylvania, a big prize with 20 votes, and equally unlikely to be achieved.Biden won the electoral college by 306-232, the same margin by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, a victory he insisted on calling a landslide. Candidates require 270 electoral college votes to win. Trump is also fighting on in Nevada.By continuing to refuse to concede, Trump is holding up transition processes including funding for Biden to build his administration, even as the US flounders amid a coronavirus surge.In a statement announcing the request for recounts in Wisconsin, Trump campaign counsel Jim Troupis said: “The people of Wisconsin deserve to know whether their election processes worked in a legal and transparent way. Regrettably, the integrity of the election results cannot be trusted without a recount in these two counties and uniform enforcement of Wisconsin absentee ballot requirements.”The Wisconsin elections commission confirmed it had received $3m from the Trump campaign for the partial recount.A full recount would reportedly have cost nearly $8m. Trump continues to seek donations for recount efforts, though it has been widely reported that much such money is being used to pay off campaign debt and to stoke a political action committee formed to tighten Trump’s grip on the Republican party after he is obliged to leave the White House in January.Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud have been rubbished by officials from both parties and mainstream observers, as all moves to stall Biden’s march to victory have failed.In Michigan, Republican officials backed down amid cries of outrageous racism after threatening to block certification of results in Wayne county, the large, majority African American county that incorporates Detroit. Trump praised their blocking attempt on Twitter.After an election race is called for a projected winner in a state, such as by the Associated Press, results still have to be officially certified by state officials.Biden won Michigan by around 346,000 votes.Dave Wasserman, US House editor of the non-partisan Cook Political Report, said: “It’s time to start calling baseless conspiracies what they are: libellous attacks on the 500,000-plus heroic poll workers and election administrators in every corner of the US who pulled off a successful election amid record-shattering turnout and a global pandemic.”Reverberations also continued from the president’s decision to fire Krebs, one of his own federal appointees.In a statement last week, Cisa, Krebs’s agency, said: “The 3 November election was the most secure in American history. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”In his tweet firing Krebs, Trump claimed the statement was “highly inaccurate”.Schiff, the Democratic House intelligence committee chair, called the firing “pathetic and predictable from a president who views truth as his enemy”.Angus King, an independent Maine senator, said: “By firing [Krebs] for doing his job, President Trump is harming all Americans.”Krebs said: “Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow. #Protect2020” More
What the Democrats Need to Understand About America
The most-watched election in the world is over, and the United States will have a new president. Democrats succeeded in removing Donald Trump from office — the first one-term president in nearly 30 years and the fourth in the last century — but the Republican Party won this election. Joe Biden will begin his presidency …
Continue Reading “What the Democrats Need to Understand About America”
The post What the Democrats Need to Understand About America appeared first on Fair Observer. More- in US Politics
Biden's cabinet could do a lot – if he resists the urge to fill it with 'consensus' picks | Max Moran and Miranda Litwak
If this election was the beginning of the end of “the Trump Show,” the writers didn’t pick a very satisfying conclusion. True, despite a deadly pandemic and organized Republican voter suppression, more people turned out than ever before to vote for Joe Biden. But, unless Democrats are successful in Georgia, the Senate will likely still be controlled by Mitch McConnell – a man whose life’s work has been to stifle government action – come 2021. McConnell’s continued power seems to temper any hopes of the bold action we need in this moment.At least, that’s the narrative being pushed by the one group delighted by this outcome: big corporations and Wall Street, who were hoping for a divided government from day one of the 2020 campaign. Bankers celebrated the electoral outcome, telling Vanity Fair: “Wall Street will love it. Are you kidding me? A growth agenda without overburdensome regulation or tax reform? C’mon. Are you kidding me? [T]hey live for fucking gridlock.”For corporate America, divided government is a blessing. A dysfunctional legislature will struggle to pass laws raising corporate taxes or cracking down on corporate malfeasance. But just as importantly, by pushing the narrative that no progressives could ever get anything through a Republican-controlled Senate, corporate executives can position themselves as bipartisan “consensus” picks for powerful cabinet posts and regulatory jobs. In fact, they’re already jockeying for them. Before election results were clear, former Lehman Brothers executive and failed Republican presidential candidate John Kasich immediately chastised the left, claiming progressives nearly cost Biden the election. Kasich, who himself hasn’t won an election in six years and utterly failed to deliver Ohio to Biden, has been angling for a cabinet post for weeks.In reality, corporate executives and lobbyists are only “consensus” cabinet picks among their fellow CEOs and corporate lawyers: by a staggering 2 to 1 margin, voters of all stripes – including Republicans – say that Biden should not hire big business executives to run his government. If democracy means anything in this country – and the 2020 election’s jaw-dropping turnout means the people still believe in democracy – Biden cannot pick a corporate cabinet. It’s perhaps the one issue on which Americans are united.And so long as Biden resists the pressure to sell his executive branch out to the highest bidder, there’s still plenty he can do to improve average people’s lives without trying to appease McConnell.Biden’s Plan B for filling out a cabinet involves the Vacancies Act, which lets the president temporarily make a senior staffer at a given agency the secretary, or bring a different Senate-confirmed individual (like the many Democratic commissioners at independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission) into the cabinet job temporarily. He can also make appointments while the Senate is in recess, as presidents of both parties do all the time. Biden could even force the Senate into recess by playing a bit of constitutional hardball – the kind of hardball McConnell plays constantly.Likewise, corporate America might want you to think that a Republican Senate means that any hope of tackling big business’s abuses – and thus improving working conditions, cleaning air and drinking water, and granting Americans a life of economic dignity – is now gone. These fatalists ask how exactly Biden is supposed to get these policies past McConnell, failing to mention that Biden doesn’t need to.Biden’s treasury department can implement financial regulations to impede investments in the fossil fuel industry and reallocate funds to tackle Covid-19 and provide support to the most harmed Americans. Biden’s justice department can prosecute Big Oil companies or seek breakups of corporate monopolies. Biden’s labor department can enforce OSHA rules and crack down on wage theft like never before, making sure people’s hard-earned wages actually make it into their pockets. His IRS can focus on ensuring the rich pay their fair share, instead of auditing poor Americans making mistakes on their taxes. He can even, with one directive to his acting education secretary, cancel 95% of student loan debt. There are at least 277 actions broadly popular within both wings of the Democratic party which Biden could take on day one of his administration. And he needn’t even walk near a McConnell-controlled Senate to do them.Yet all of these actions depend on Biden appointing committed soldiers for the public good – not corporate allies. A treasury secretary Gina Raimondo would prioritize slashing aid to struggling cities in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, as she has in her home state. If ex-Googlers like Roger Ferguson or Eric Schmidt pepper the executive branch, it will undercut the authority of the most important antitrust suit in a generation. Appointing Seth Harris to labor secretary will give the intellectual architect of California’s Prop 22 an insider’s angle to spread pain for gig-economy workers.Stopping these people must be a priority for the Democratic base. Activists can and should make clear to Biden that their repayment for hard work should be a highly-motivated and public interest-minded executive branch.Executive actions represent the best hope for aggressively tackling our many interlinked crises – not to mention the best hope for Biden’s party to stand any chance in the 2022 and 2024 elections. The Democrats must have something to show for the trust the American people has placed in them. Failure in the coming years could mean a second Trump term, or worse: a new far-right nationalist who is better organized and more serious than Trump.Biden and the Democrats can only defeat such a threat by showing the American people that, yes, their government is still capable of improving their lives in tangible, substantive ways. Executive authority provides Biden with no shortage of ways to do that – but only if he resists the false “bipartisanship” that corporate lobbyists are furiously pushing across Washington. Such individuals cannot populate a Biden cabinet. More
