Cloudy this morning with thunderstorms developing this afternoon. High 84F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Locally heavy rainfall possible..
Tonight
Showers and thunderstorms likely. Potential for heavy rainfall. Low 69F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 80%.
The op-ed recently published in the Gazette-Mail, “Biden has failed in his vow to unite the country,” by former Republican delegate Chris Stansbury and Jill Upson, executive director of the Herbert Henderson Office of Minority Affairs, falsely touts Donald Trump’s 2017 “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” as “effective policymaking.”
It isn’t as if the Biden administration has not set before the country a sweeping set of smart policy proposals to cure interlocking environmental and social ills.
Biden’s policy success has been stymied by a philosophy of which the 2017 Tax Act is an embodiment and which itself is the primary driver of our national disharmony — the neoliberal philosophy, or “trickle down” economics. The primary beneficiary of the 2017 tax cuts was large corporations, and corporations primarily used those cuts to fund shareholder buybacks, driving up stock prices and enriching the already rich.
No new job bump resulted from its passage. Recent history shows that the trickle-down concept, cultivated in the 2017 tax cut, doesn’t create jobs or work in any other way to make society better.
Privatization, deregulation, lowering taxes on the wealthy, shrinking government till you can drown it in a bathtub — these ideas have been popular to greater and lesser extents among representatives of both parties until Biden took office. And they are bankrupt ideas, transparently functioning to siphon more wealth and power to those who already possess it.
A recent example of pushing back against this philosophy is the proposed Global Minimum Corporate Tax agreement, spearheaded by Biden and already agreed to by all European countries other than authoritarian Viktor Orban’s Hungary. The agreement would impose a minimum tax of 15% on corporations everywhere to prevent job off-shoring and corporate shirking of tax responsibility.
According to former U.S. secretary of labor Robert Reich, only two obstacles block passage of this sensible policy: Hungary, whose Prime Minister Orban was begged by U.S. congressional Republicans to oppose the deal, and our own Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.
Neoliberalism is dressed up social Darwinism — survival of the fittest, wealth as a badge of intelligence and worthiness. The philosophy flatters billionaires’ delusions of grandeur.
Our current climate and political crises, which will ultimately threaten all social classes, show the delusion to be dangerous nonsense. Nature offers a better metaphor than survival of the fittest, as we now know. Beneath the fractious competition of the animals and plants in a forest there is a deep, underlying current of cooperation which keeps the forest healthy.
People like microbiologist Paul Stamets and ecology professor Suzanne Simard have shown that, depending on current need, water and nutrients are shuttled from one tree to another, even between trees of different species, from the rich to the poor, using fungal networks.
How this is done remains a mystery, but the why of it is not so mysterious. It’s self-sacrifice, generosity and sharing of resources, investment in the community as a whole. This promotes the long-term well-being of all. When this general principle of life is more widely recognized, we will have a more united country.
