Biden’s false departure: he says he wants to unite the country, but the first decrees promote the radical agenda
So should President Biden be the man of national unity and reconciliation? Apart from his inaugural speech, far from unifying (as Federico Punzi analyzed on these columns), his presidency kicks off with a false start that already says a lot: the Twitter page of the US embassy in Israel is renamed " US Embassy of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza ”. Two governments insulted in one fell swoop: Israel which does not recognize the independence of either the West Bank or Gaza and also the Palestinian Authority which certainly does not recognize Gaza controlled by Hamas (terrorist movement, according to the US classification). The page was changed again, after a couple of hours, and returned to being the "Embassy of Israel". They didn't take it very well in Jerusalem. It is unlikely that he was a hacker, as we now say in Roman politics, or just an oversight. Without being conspirators, however, it is a sign of how the Middle East is understood in the new administration.
The second false start concerns the alliance with the United Kingdom and is symbolically more important: first of all, Biden has "exiled" the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office , after four years of having guarded Trump's desk. Obama too had done so, raising not a few criticisms both at home and in the United Kingdom (Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, had responded with a harsh reprimand and for this he had obviously been accused of racism). This time the relocation of the bust of the winner of the war against Nazism was more muted, probably out of fear. Because the statues of Churchill, his monument in London erected near the Parliament, have been the subject of violent protests by the Black Lives Matter movement, which accuses the British statesman of "racism". With a third world campaign starting from afar, Churchill's victory was eclipsed by episodes (unfairly) attributed to him, such as the terrible famine in Bangladesh, and in general by his strenuous defense of the British Empire, today seen as an unacceptable expression of white supremacism. Its removal is therefore a tribute to this ideology, especially since the busts of the heroes of the civil rights movement have now been transferred to the Oval Office itself: Rosa Parks, Robert Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King.
But it is on the domestic front and in relations with supranational institutions that Biden's policy is starting with a radical attitude. First of all in the method: a shower of executive orders. The president suggests that the law will be issued directly by the executive power, without too many discussions or passages in Congress, and also bypassing the prerogatives of the States. "President-elect Biden is taking office at a time when our nation is going through a deep crisis – reads the note from his cabinet chief Ron Klain – We are facing four crises that overlap and add up: the Covid crisis -19 , the consequent economic crisis, the climate crisis and the racial crisis. All four crises require urgent action. In his first ten days of presidency, President-elect Biden will take decisive action to address these four crises, to prevent other urgent problems that are otherwise irreversible and to restore American prestige in the world ”. Where everything is understood as a "crisis", the extraordinary acts of the executive become ordinary.
A challenge to the States will be constituted by the (apparently secondary and necessary) "challenge of the 100 days with the mask" and consists in imposing the obligation of a mask on a national scale, in all federal properties and in travel between States. Already in the presidential debates, Trump had challenged his democratic rival the idea of federalizing the obligation to mask: health care is a prerogative of the States, in fact. The "challenge" is therefore a compromise: an obligation, yes, but only when in transit between two states (therefore between two different health regulations and systems) or in the properties of the federal government. In spite of China's role in the WHO and the damage it has created to the rest of the world, with another executive order, the US will once again enter the ranks of the great financiers of the UN health agency.
But it is on climate and racial fairness that Biden will bet his cards in the first ten days of government. As for the climate, the first action will be to bring the US back to the Paris Agreement. The Treaty will require the US to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2025. Energy entrepreneurs fear facing enormous adjustment and transformation costs at a time when they are already in crisis due to the pandemic. The first victim, now confirmed, is the strategic Keystone XL oil pipeline, along the west coast, severely contested by ecologists and Native American associations. Although the company had assured, in recent days, to create a "zero emissions" work, among the executive orders of Biden there is also the cancellation of the project. Biden has openly promised that he wants to overcome energy production with fossil fuels, putting the entire oil and coal industry at risk. Precisely in a period in which, at least since 2018, the US has become an oil exporter.
As for the racial front, with another very important symbolic move, Biden cancels the newly established "Commission 1776" , aimed at preserving national history in school curricula. In its place, Biden orders agencies to develop school programs based on racial equality, even here, perhaps, to please the students who tear down the statues of Christopher Columbus and Thomas Jefferson without making too many distinctions. In addition to this, on the immigration front, just as another "caravan" has started from Central America, Biden orders the end of the construction of the wall on the border with Mexico, the abolition of the access ban from seven Muslim countries considered at risk of terrorism (while flights to and from Brazil, the United Kingdom and the EU remain blocked, due to Covid ) and the cancellation of the new restrictive measures on immigration. The goal is to regularize as much as possible of the 11 million irregular immigrants present in the US.
In this far from exhaustive and expanding list of Biden's first executive orders, we find much of the radical left's program. What unit are we talking about then?
The post Biden's false departure: he says he wants to unite the country, but the first decrees promote the radical agenda appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/falsa-partenza-di-biden-dice-di-voler-unire-il-paese-ma-i-primi-decreti-promuovono-lagenda-radicale/ on Fri, 22 Jan 2021 05:01:00 +0000.