Colon street scene on the day the Seguro Social “dialogue” was set to start. At least five groups, with their assorted but mainly economic demands, were out in the streets. PRD politicians who had not spoken with them were on the news trying to spin psychological arguments. Yet more insults for the tally sheet of grievances. Unattributed photo widely featured on Twitter.

Few will want to hear it

The PRD president / legislative heavyweight / baseball czar who looted PANDEPORTES with ploys like the “purchase” of baseball bats for more than $350 each will head the ruling party’s delegation to the Social Security Fund “dialogue.” He just got a Supreme Court ruling that he can’t be investigated or charged with anything about that, so “of course” it never happened. His supporting cast of characters will include politicians who have close to their entire families on the public payroll. The banks that were the only winners in the last Seguro Social “reform,” and which got half a billion dollars in subsidies at the outset of the ongoing epidemic, will have their say.

We will be told that pensions and health care must be cut, that working people will have to pay more. Also, that it’s just not practical to cut the costs of all manner of corruption, nor to raise taxes for the rich.

It’s just going to increase public anger and disgust, and bring hunger to a lot of folks. That playbook is used up.

The legitimately elected Joe Biden, about to assume his greatest challenge. Pixabay graphic by BarBay.

Joe’s turn

Joe Biden won the November election. Fact, not opinion. There is no alternative in any place that’s real.

He beat a lifelong con man, a president so irresponsible that without thinking he tore a hole in the US defenses against epidemics because they didn’t come from him. History will judge Donald Trump harshly, and very likely part of that judgment will be handed down in court cases against him.

But Biden urges the Congress not to concentrate too much on investigations and proceedings about what has gone on these past four years. There are multiple crises upon us urge the government’s immediate attention.

Impunity for Donald Trump would be a bad idea. Letting the State of New York pursue him for fraud as soon as his presidential immunity is gone would be a better one.

Some terrible legacies left over are among Biden’s immediate challenges. The armed wing of the far right needs to be put our of business. Families of asylum seekers that were cruelly and illegally divided need to be reunited. Many transactions of a transactional style of governance need to be voided. 

It’s a different country and a different world than it was in 2016, and back then the United States got Trump because notwithstanding all denials things were not going very well and there was a great yearning for change. Now we know, if we didn’t before, that all change is not necessarily for the better.

Trump harked back to a mythical greatness of a mythical past, something that never existed as describe that he said he wanted to restore. THAT ought to teach the country about “reality TV!” It’s time for nonfiction, and a president and congress who look forward.

The approximately one-third of the US electorate who believe in weird conspiracies need to be left behind. The many Americans who have been left behind for an economy not meant to work for them need to be brought into the fold, with economic development and a sense of justice that replace despair not only with hope, but with the actual improvements in living standards that have mostly not happened for most people for more than a generation now. The slogans and labels are not what matter. Meeting today’s and tomorrow’s challenges, building for needs to come rather than to imitate what’s gone, turning into a better educated and more just society — these are the things that will leave QAnon, End Times religion, the Proud Boys and so on as curious relics at the farthest fringes, far from any politics that matter.

Good people are going to argue and disagree with the new president, but he knows a thing or two about negotiating such situations. He knows even if what he steps into is unprecedented. It’s about democracy, something that the USA has seen degraded over many years, but which Americans rose up at the polls to defend when it was threatened with extinction. The republic endures.

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