As much as I’m glad Joe Biden won (or, more precisely, that Donald Trump lost) the election, I’m really doubtful that a Biden/Harris governance will make a marked improvement in poor and low-income Americans’ quality of life, however much the pair might try.
And I have a hard time imagining anything resembling “Obamacare” coming back.
I can vividly recall then-president Barack Obama’s capitulation—like so many other neo-liberal presidents before him and likely after him—to big money politics in the very worst way, with the Flint, Michigan drinking-water atrocity.
As a then admirer of the president, I muttered, “Please say it isn’t so,” as he drank (at least what supposedly was) a glass of the Flint water; this signified that the health-hazardously lead-laden water is actually safe to drink, which he must have known is not.
I henceforth saw U.S. presidents, and Canadian prime ministers, mostly as large corporate and power interest puppets.
The American political system essentially involves two established conservative and (neo)liberal parties more or less alternating in governance while habitually kowtowing to the interests of the very wealthy but especially big business’s crippling threats (whether implied or explicit) of a loss of jobs, capital investment and/or economic stability, etcetera.
This of course fails to mention, amongst other things, the corporate-welfare-cheque subsidies doled out annually to already very profitable corporations and the forgiveness of huge loan debts owed to taxpayers.
Also, almost all of our information is still produced and/or shared with us by concentrated corporate-owned media.
This corporate-political reality may be why so many low-income citizens have felt futility in voting at all, let alone waiting in long lineups in the weather to do so.
Story by Frank Sterle Jr.
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