Biden Wraps up Another Dismal Year

Biden is about to wrap another dismal year as his administration’s participation in the genocide in Israel is set to wreak havoc on his 2024 presidential campaign. People across the US have been taking to the streets, protesting the ongoing Israeli’s siege on Palestinians in Gaza since October 8. As the death toll in Gaza nears 22,000, the United States and the Biden administration continue to unconditionally support Israel. 

As a result, voters, especially Arab-American voters, have abandoned their support for Biden and the Democratic Party in droves. But Biden is no stranger to neglecting the demands of his base, as his record as president has shown:

1. Mass protests condemn Biden’s participation in genocide

The Biden administration as directly and indirectly facilitated the genocide in Gaza. Biden himself has bypassed Congress to send weapons to Israel, and continues to push for massive Israel military aid packages at the legislative level. The seven-day pause in Israeli aggression ended following Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to the state, when he essentially gave the greenlight to Israel to resume strikes on Gaza. Biden has participated in pro-genocide rhetoric, openly questioning the validity of the Palestinian death toll. The White House went as far to condemn the progressive congress members calling for a ceasefire, calling the pressure for peace “repugnant” and “disgraceful.” 

2. Working class in jeopardy as social safety net destroyed 

Biden’s domestic policy is a reflection of overzealous military spending and a willingness to neglect the needs of his own people. Biden has allowed for the further destruction of the COVID-era social safety net during his presidency. 

Due to the so-called “unwinding” of pandemic-era public healthcare expansion, at least 2.2 million children have been removed from the government insurance program Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program—although the real number could be closer to 3 million. Experts say that Biden has not done enough to stop the purging of up to 30 million people from public health insurance programs. It is not only states with Republican leadership that are some of the worst offenders in “purging” people off of Medicaid roles—states with governors from Biden’s own Democratic Party are also doing the same.

“The same Congress where the Democrats control the Senate, the Republicans barely control the house, five million people, and more than 1.5 million of them are children, who can no longer go to a doctor because Congress has decided that Medicaid expansion, which took place during COVID has been rescinded,” said socialist leader Brian Becker at the Dilemmas of Humanity conference in Atlanta this summer. “It’s not because they don’t have the money, they decided to do this. They decided to do this. I mean they just spent 880 billion dollars for the next military budget for one year. 880 billion dollars. And they’re saying we don’t have the money for low income families and their children to go to a doctor?”

3. Cost of living squeezes workers as Biden looks on

Meanwhile, conditions remain dire for working people, with over half of those surveyed by the US Census having some difficulty affording basic weekly expenses. Food prices have risen dramatically during Biden’s administration, rising by 10.6% from November 2021 to November 2022, and continuing to rise by 2.9% from November 2022 to November 2021—in part due to the ongoing war in Ukraine that Biden only wants to continue. 

4. Student loan borrowers granted no relief due to Biden’s failures

Federal student loan payments, which had been on pause since March 2020, resumed on October 1 of this year following a series of failures by the Biden administration and Democrats to enact significant debt relief. In August of 2022, Biden launched a student loan debt relief program that would have zeroed out the debts of 20 million people. However, conservatives led legal challenges against the program that immediately halted it before anyone’s debt could be forgiven. The case against the program was taken up all the way to the conservative Supreme Court, which struck down the measure in June. The Debt Collective, a group which organizes student loan borrowers into a “debtor’s union,” claims that Biden had executive authority to do far more to keep college grads out of debt. 

5. Building on a legacy of broken promises

Biden started off his presidency breaking major campaign promises to the people of the US. One major promise was to raise the federal minimum wage from a paltry USD 7.25 an hour to USD 15, a goal of the organized labor movement for many years. Instead, only a few months into his presidency, he gave up all pretenses of a fight by surrendering to a technicality in the Senate proceedings, which his administration could have easily bypassed.

Also early into his presidency, Biden shorted the people of the United States on stimulus checks. In the version of Biden’s American Rescue Plan that was finally passed by Congress in March of 2021, the originally planned COVID-19 stimulus check was brought down from USD 2,000, as promised by Biden and the Democrats during his election campaign, to USD 1,400. The additional weekly unemployment benefits of USD 300 passed in the Plan were much smaller than the USD 600 that was previously afforded in the CARES Act, passed in March of 2020 during Trump’s presidency.

Biden put up zero fight in September of 2021, when expanded pandemic-era unemployment benefits expired for 7.5 million people.

It is highly likely that the candidates from the two major parties in 2024 will be Biden and Trump—two presidents who oversaw the deterioration of the living conditions of the vast majority of people in the US. Many are looking for an alternative to the Republican and Democratic tickets. Several strong contenders for President have emerged, including the socialist and anti-imperialist campaign of Claudia De La Cruz, which has been openly challenging Biden’s policy regarding Israel, among other things. 

This Christmas Eve, may the world remember that Genocide Joe and the settler colonial state of Israel have killed over 10,000 Palestinian children. They have killed baby Jesus 10,000 times over. They have taken the holy out of Christmas Day.

May we continue to fight for a free… https://t.co/mCEaIn7hMw

— Claudia (@Claud9_) December 24, 2023