(Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call file photo)
Despite the clown show on the part of the Trump team, it does appear that by hook or by crook, Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States. Trump's obstinance has resulted in a strangely informal transition process, Biden not being privy to intelligence briefings as would normally be the case for a President-Elect. Nevertheless, Biden's team has begun filling out his cabinet and it is from this process that we can get a fairly clear idea of the sort of executive branch we're all going to be dealing with for the next four years. What we've seen so far has been unsurprisingly gloomy.
The pick that has received the most blowback on the left has doubtless been Cedric Richmond, currently House Rep for the 2nd Congressional District of Louisiana and soon-to-be Senior Adviser to the Biden administration, and public liaison to "the business community and climate change activists." The young black Democrat came at the recommendation of Sen. Jim Clyburn, whose crucial endorsement of Biden is generally recognized to have been the key move that sank the Sanders campaign, leading Biden to victory in South Carolina and subsequently make him the clear establishment favorite going into Super Tuesday. It would appear this move is at least in part Biden returning the favor.
Richmond is perhaps one of the most stark examples of a new generation of black establishment Democrats, posing as near radicals in the racial culture war while demonstrating shockingly little interest in the well being of the poor black people who actually voted for them. He is a remarkable fundraiser, raking in $340k from the oil and gas industry (the fifth largest among House Democrats), and notably another $148k from the chemicals industry. He is also notable among Democrats both for his support of the Keystone XL pipeline in 2015, support for Atlantic oil drilling exploration in 2019, and several other pro-oil votes (links provided in the Daily Poster article sourced above). These decisions could be explained by the Louisiana electorate being unusually supportive of the oil industry, except that the pipeline wouldn't have added a single job to the Louisiana economy because, for those who weren't aware, the Keystone XL Pipeline was never proposed to pass through Louisiana. Of course the other issue with that argument is that Richmond's district, containing New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is almost 62% black and 95% urban, a group of voters not the least bit interested in the oil industry, even in Louisiana. How to explain Richmond's support, then? To be honest, it's beyond me. He has a laughably safe seat- a D+25 district in which he didn't even face a democratic challenger in 2018. Nonetheless, he amassed an impressive war chest, particularly since he had no one to point it at.
Where Richmond could have made considerable strides for his constituents was in the issue of air quality. Richmond's district is known to contain 7 of the 10 most polluted districts in the country according to the EPA, due precisely to the proliferation of chemical manufacturing and the fossil fuel industry in the district. While there have been calls in the senate on the part of Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren to address the pollution in Richmond's district (which has cancer rates that blow the national average out of the water), the congressman actually representing the district has been conspicuously silent on the matter. The Guardian wrote a piece expanding on the issue here.
That Richmond is a stooge is no secret at this point, and others have already expanded on it in detail. What is interesting is how a representative who has pretty clearly left his constituents for dead has remained so popular in his district, and now found himself walking into the white house under a president who was elected with promises to pass sweeping climate policy.
Richmond talks a fairly good game on expanding black people's access to education and housing, as well as criminal justice and police reform, and his prominence within the party seems to coincide with his ability to garner media attention while speaking on the subject. A video of him confronting Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz at a police reform hearing went viral, and in it we see something of the racial essentialist rhetoric that has come to define so much discussion around police violence towards black people, describing law enforcement as the "imminent threat that black men face at this moment", and on that basis suggested that he cared more about Gaetz's black grandson than he did.
It's important to be careful here: my point is not to delegitimize the issue of police reform. What we do want to be careful about is letting establishment politicians co-opt that rhetoric to build their political brand without actually helping black people (Richmond's other spotlight moment was threatening to assault republican lawmakers if they kept taking down a painting hung at the Capitol that depicted police as pigs). Members of the black elite like Richmond who paint themselves as advocates for racial justice but can't bring themselves to sponsor Medicare for All (Richmond has also received substantial six figure sums from Insurance and Pharmaceutical groups) or crack down on corporations polluting black neighborhoods should be held with a degree of suspicion. At the end of the day, rhetoric is one thing and appropriation of funds is another. The latter paints a clearer picture.
The position which I held during the election (and still wholeheartedly defend) was that Biden needed to be supported on the grounds of harm reduction. He presented an opportunity for progressive and leftist groups to more effectively organize and, most crucially, pass climate policy that would allow for the continued existence of organized human civilization. I see no reason to mince words about that. Now that Biden has won the election, left wing activists must use the opportunity to save democrats from themselves, and in so doing save ourselves from them. This means clearly denouncing decisions like this and making it clear 1) to conservatives that we see the same shortcomings in this incoming administration that they do and 2) to liberals that Biden is not the friendly, cuddly teddy bear they think he is, and neither are any of his rich friends.
I explained in my last post how for all of Obama's anti-establishment rhetoric, he couldn't have been less of a populist when he actually governed. What allowed him to get away with it was the total absence of any political awareness on the left. There is a very real danger that Biden appoints a corporatist cabinet that carries on the neoliberal agenda that resulted in disastrous defeats in both 2014 and 2016, and the liberal public, happily rid of the orange menace, will blissfully let it pass them by only to get eviscerated by a stronger, more explicitly class conscious right in 2022 and 2024. It will only be avoided through a clearheaded rejection of the class collaborative politics Biden espouses, and for the left to offer something new, starting with the cancellation of student debt and the passage of a Labor-led Green New Deal.