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Like Lyndon B. Johnson, Biden committed a foreign policy mistake that threw his significant domestic wins into the shade.
Presidents have two major legacies, on domestic policy and on foreign policy. Big foreign policy mistakes can throw even gargantuan domestic wins into the shade. President Lyndon Baines Johnson reshaped the United States with his Great Society programs, and at least acquiesced in finally ending Jim Crow racial discrimination. Johnson’s obsession with winning the Vietnam War and his investment in the false “domino theory” of the spread of Communism, however, doomed his presidency and harmed the United States for decades.
I’m old, so I remember as a teenager watching Johnson on March 31, 1968 come on television and announce that he would not seek another term in office. Unfortunately, the Vietnam War would grind on until 1972, taking two million or more Vietnamese lives and 58,220 U.S. military casualties. By 1975 the U.S. would withdraw entirely, amid chaos.
I was reminded of LBJ’s resignation speech by U.S. President Joe Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he would not seek another term.
Biden’s extreme backing for Netanyahu’s genocide has left an indelible stain on his presidency and has harmed U.S. diplomacy around the world.
Much to the annoyance of my leftist friends, I once suggested that Biden would be the most consequential president since Lyndon Johnson. I’m reprinting my reasoning below. Those achievements, however, were domestic.
Like Johnson, Biden has provoked massive campus protests by going all in on a ruinous foreign misadventure. In Biden’s case, the great white whale has been the destruction of Hamas, and his albatross has been his “bear hug” of the extremist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Biden has resupplied Israel with ammunition and weaponry in real time to allow Netanyahu and his far, far right cronies (the Israeli equivalents of Neo-Nazis) to destroy much of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and to kill over 38,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children. Biden’s State Department has avoided concluding that Israel has misused U.S. weaponry to commit war crimes, making a mockery of the Leahy Act. Biden has attempted to create a U.S. shield of impunity for Netanyahu, even calling a United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolution “nonbinding” (it was binding). The International Criminal Court found on January 26 that South Africa’s genocide case against Israel was plausibly brought and ordered a halt to such activities, but to no effect. Biden himself disputed the numbers of dead Palestinians at first, but later admitted that 30,000 had been killed, going on to say, “It must not be 60,000.” He drew a red line around Rafah, but Netanyahu made a laughingstock out of him by simply ignoring U.S. strictures and destroying Rafah the way he had previously destroyed Gaza City.
Biden’s extreme backing for Netanyahu’s genocide has left an indelible stain on his presidency and has harmed U.S. diplomacy around the world.
The president has only a few months to make at least some amends for his catastrophic Gaza policy. He should restore funding to the U.N. Reliefs and Works Agency, which Israel falsely accused of being a Hamas front. Even Britain has restored funding, but Biden remains the odd man out.
Biden should cut off shipments to Israel of further munitions unless Netanyahu gets out of Gaza and lets the Palestine Authority move in to govern it.
Biden should massively sanction the Israeli enterprise of squatting on ever more Palestinian land in the West Bank.
As for his domestic legacy, I wrote in 2022:
Biden came into office under the cloud of the pandemic and former President Donald Trump’s lackadaisical response to it, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. It is true that Biden had the advantage that the vaccines had been developed, in part with Trump’s investment in Moderna. (Pfizer marketed the German Biontech vaccine). But under Trump, few federal resources had been mobilized and one leak suggested that Jared Kushner deliberately hurt New York’s response to punish it for voting Democratic.
Biden mobilized the U.S. military to provide vaccinators, because there were too few civilian ones, and coordinated with states and localities. In six months he got those adults vaccinated who were willing, and began the process whereby getting Covid-19 for most of people was no longer life-threatening. As for the die hard Trumpist old people who refuse to get vaccinated, they are harming themselves and those around them.
Biden’s pandemic intervention is estimated to have saved a million lives.
Biden put America back to work, getting the unemployment rate down to levels not seen since the Woodstock Music Festival and the craze for paisley.
So much production had temporarily cut back during the pandemic that when consumers wanted to buy again, there were bottlenecks that caused inflation. These supply problems are easing, though prices of staples remain too high. In some instances, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine caused spikes that won’t be easy to overcome, both in energy prices and in wheat prices. Still, gasoline prices have fallen steadily for two months now.
Biden charged the Department of the Interior to jumpstart the U.S. offshore wind industry, with a goal of 30 gigawatts by 2030, by leasing federal waters offshore to private companies. We will see some new, enormous wind farms come on line in as little as four years, some of the biggest in the world.
Biden glad-handed and wheedled to get the bipartisan $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed, which will among other things build out electric vehicle charging stations throughout the country and help schools buy electric buses, along with investments in bridges (10% of which seem to be on the verge of falling down) and other key infrastructure. It even has $65 billion in it to ease access for all Americans to the internet, which should increase productivity.
Biden got a new industrial policy with the $52 billion in the CHIPS Act for revving up a U.S.-based semi-conductor industry, which is key to progress in fighting climate change, as well. He arranged funding for veterans suffering the after-effects of toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.
...He succeeded in encouraging Democrats in the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act... with $369 billion for the green energy transition. It will also make seniors’ medicines cheaper and help the 40% of the country stricken by long-term drought owing to the climate emergency adopt resiliency measures.
"Even if their homes stay dry, disruptive flooding of vital infrastructure could leave people essentially stranded within their communities or enduring intolerable and even unlivable conditions."
As Americans endure extreme heat and wildfires exacerbated by fossil fuel-driven climate change, an analysis revealed Tuesday that rising seas threaten infrastructure critical for millions of people in hundreds of U.S. communities.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report notes that "the nearly 90 million people living in U.S. coastal communities depend on an array of critical infrastructure," which the group defined as "assets and facilities that provide functions necessary to sustain daily life," including "schools, hospitals, public and affordable housing, energy infrastructure, and wastewater treatment plants."
"We also include known sites of industrial contamination that, if they were to flood, could expose people to toxic or hazardous pollutants," UCS explained. "The resulting list of critical infrastructure analyzed here is in some instances more expansive than the types included in the U.S. government's definition but does not include all the types that are likely of concern to individual communities."
Kristina Dahl, the report's lead author and a principal climate scientist at UCS, pointed out in a statement that "if these facilities are flooded even just once, it can be incredibly disruptive or even paralyzing to daily life."
"Communities don't have long to prepare before their vital coastal assets are routinely under threat from climate change-caused flooding," she said. "Our analysis shows that by 2030, the amount of critical infrastructure at risk of repeat flooding along U.S. coastlines is expected to grow by 20% compared to 2020 conditions."
The group analyzed three scenarios for the rest of this century—seas rising by 1.6 feet, 3.2 feet, and 6.5 feet—and also found that "between now and 2050, climate change-driven sea-level rise will expose more than 1,600 critical infrastructure assets coastwide to disruptive flooding at least twice per year."
That's "a near doubling from 2020 exposure and a 53% increase relative to 2030 exposure," the report states. "Of those assets, nearly 1,100 are expected to flood monthly, on average, in this time frame."
The states facing the highest threats of disruptive flooding are Louisiana, New Jersey, Florida, Maryland, and California. Already, some insurance companies are bailing on coastal communities due to the rising disaster risk. The new publication says that "future flooding particularly threatens public and affordable housing."
Erika Spanger, a report co-author and director of strategic climate analytics at UCS, noted that "even if their homes stay dry, disruptive flooding of vital infrastructure could leave people essentially stranded within their communities or enduring intolerable and even unlivable conditions."
The document highlights that "this burden is borne inequitably: More than half the infrastructure at risk by 2050 is in communities at a disadvantage based on historical and ongoing racism, discrimination, and pollution."
"The amount of infrastructure in jeopardy late this century will depend heavily on countries' choices about global heat-trapping emissions," the publication stresses. "Policymakers and public and private decision-makers must take immediate, science-based steps to safeguard critical infrastructure and achieve true, long-term coastal resilience."
The report includes sections for six specific recommendations:
"There is a narrow window of time for federal, state, and local policymakers to provide funding and resources and for local
decision-makers to use this backing to implement changes in their communities in preparation for an inevitable increase of regular disruptive flooding," the document warns. "Investments in resilience, equitably shared, can help build a safer, fairer future for all."
As we remember those who lost their lives in the bridge disaster, let's not forget the people who are killed by structural violence every day in Baltimore.
Baltimore's mayor was the target of racist social media attacks after he spoke to reporters about the collapse of the Key Bridge. That's disgusting, but it's hardly surprising. Racism is carved into the city's very infrastructure. It has reshaped its neighborhoods, highways, and mass transit.
The destruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge was tragic. But the bridge's primary purpose wasn't to serve Baltimore; it was to get around it. It certainly wasn't built for Baltimore's low-income residents, many of whom don't even have cars. What good is a bridge to people who don't own an automobile?
The numbers are startling on that score. Nationally, only 8.3 percent of American households don't have a car. But in Baltimore's Sandtown neighborhood, that figure is 58.4 percent. It's 48.9 percent in Southwest Baltimore and 47.9 percent in Upton/Druid Heights.
These neighborhoods are under siege. In Upton/Druid Heights, for example, 58 percent of children live in poverty. That's nearly six times higher than the overall state of Maryland.
People are dying in Baltimore — not from the drive-by shootings you see in the news from time to time, which have a relatively low body count. The large-scale dying comes from the city's structural drive-by, reflected in the bridges, tunnels, and highways that let interstate travelers bypass Baltimore as if it wasn't even there.
That's not to say infrastructure isn't a good investment. The structural drive-by is seen in the investments that don't happen.
Although the Key Bridge carried local traffic, its essential function was to move passengers and cargo along the interstate highway system. But another infrastructure project, which never got the green light, would have helped Baltimore's lower-income neighborhoods more.
The Red Line, a proposed addition to the city's rail system, would have linked lower-income, majority Black neighborhoods to jobs in other parts of the city –– in Camden Yards, the Inner Harbor, and the universities, medical centers, and corporations on the east side of town. But the Red Line was never built. After a string of delays, Republican Governor Larry Hogan — now, puzzlingly, the leading candidate for senator in this predominantly Democratic state — killed the project for good.
Journalist Alon Levy put it succinctly in his article on the decision, headlined "How You Can Tell Larry Hogan's Decision to Kill the Red Line Was Racially Discriminatory." Here's how: Hogan killed Baltimore's Red Line but promoted the Purple Line in richer, whiter Montgomery County. That led to a Title VI civil rights lawsuit and a federal investigation at the close of the Obama administration. But the investigation was killed after Trump took office, and the lawsuit lost momentum.
Transportation infrastructure has a long segregationist history, in Baltimore and across the country. The mid-twentieth century highway construction boom fueled white flight from urban centers. But white flight began even earlier in Baltimore, as journalist Alec MacGillis explains, with the construction of a pioneering streetcar system in the early twentieth century. That gave rise to white "streetcar suburbs" like Catonsville and Oakenshawe.
White flight made it easier to systematically neglect a city's remaining, Black neighborhoods. So did the real-estate practice of "blockbusting," which lowered the value of working-class white homes by preying on racist fears over integration. As University of Maryland Prof. W. Edward Orser documents, "blockbusting" in Baltimore allowed real estate companies to buy White homes at a loss and then sell them to Black families at inflated prices. Working-class Whites were robbed of an asset, Black families were robbed through overcharging, and segregation got worse.
Not that housing discrimination was anything new in Baltimore. It pioneered residential segregation in 1910, when the City Council passed a law designating city blocks as White or Black. (It was later struck down by the Supreme Court.)
People forget that Maryland is below the Mason-Dixon line and slavery was legal there until 1864. Advertisements for the "sale" of enslaved people were once common in the Baltimore Sun.
Today, as in the past, structural violence kills. Life expectancy in Upton/Druid Heights is 62.9 years, but it's 83.1 years in Roland Park, the city's richest neighborhood – where most households have more than one car. That's a twenty-year gap in life expectancy.
The Maryland Transportation Authority (MTA), which operated the Key Bridge, often neglects the needs of lower-income people. An electronic EZ-Pass is required to pay tolls, for example, and they are difficult to obtain without a bank account. (The Federal Reserve reports that 13 percent of Black households are unbanked.)
The MTA's floundering "traffic relief plan," crafted under Hogan, would have increased traffic in parts of the DC area and raised tolls for many drivers through a "public-private investment" that would have siphoned off highway revenue for private profit and imposed "dynamic pricing" –surge pricing that could change as often as every five minutes, driving tolls out of the reach of many area residents. It would also have given a private company control over more than 100 miles of the DC area's high-speed lanes.
Fortunately, Hogan's privatization scheme floundered after pushback from local officials and his Democratic successor. So has his other "public-private partnership," the Purple Line. But the intent was clear — and it was not to serve the Black, Brown, and White lower-income people of Maryland.
Transportation was even used against high school students during the 2015 protests over the police killing of Freddie Gray. As MacGillis writes,
"Just after Freddie Gray's memorial service had concluded, and headed for Mondawmin Mall, the transit hub for some 5,000 of them, they found several hundred police waiting ... They also found that the bus lines through the hub were suspended, as was service at the Mondawmin subway station ..."
"It was almost as if authorities were trying to engineer the confrontation that ensued between the growing mass of stranded youths and the outnumbered cops," MacGillis adds.
But these are merely the latest battles in a war that has lasted for four hundred years. The Susquehannock people were hunting in what is now Baltimore when Europeans declared the Province of Maryland in 1634. They soon became refugees in their own native land. The scattered bands that survived eventually merged into other tribes – which were also driven from the region.
Call it the first drive-by.
As we remember those who lost their lives in the bridge disaster, let's not forget the people who are killed by structural violence every day in Baltimore.