Biden may be in office, but the fight isn’t over

The 2020 election was one of the most inescapable events in decades, just below the current pandemic. This is referred to by many different people as “the most important election of our lifetime,” and record breaking voting numbers supported that idea strongly.

So an outsider must believe this election was one of good vs. evil, where there was an all encompassing heroic candidate, running against someone who embodies pure evil; but the truth is that this battle was yet another case of two evils, and the choice being who will harm the country less so in the end.

I, like many others who fall into the progressive or left wing movement, decided that while both Trump and Biden are corporate owned bigots who have spent their lives finding new ways to put the wealthiest individuals in this country before the rest, Biden would not be as damaging as four more years of Trump.

I supported Biden begrudgingly in the general election, and was excited to see him beat Trump. But one thing many of my allies have forgotten is just because we chose to support Biden, does not mean he is any friend to marginalized communities or the proletariat.

Biden has a troubling record many were able to criticize in the primaries, but that record has been forgotten or absolved by most, but I feel people need to be reminded of just how much damage he has done, so we don’t blindly support a man who has his own interests.

One of his most rightfully maligned moments was his involvement in the Crime Bill. Joe Biden helped write a bill that pushed for longer prison sentences, led to large scale prison privatization, and, most importantly, aided in increasing the severity of punishments for non-violent drug offenders. Oftentimes, this policy heavily targeted communities of color, where the CIA under Nixon forced in cocaine to criminalize communities who were against the Vietnam War.

Joe Biden may have a concerning domestic record, but his voting record on international issues shows how he believes in the horrendous policies of neocons-a group of modern conservatives who fight for corporate powers more than any actual policy, and aided in the terrorist-like imperialistic wars and coups America has used to drain the global south of any power or autonomy. 

According to The Intercept and BBC, Biden played a major role in manufacturing a coup against democratically elected president Lula de Silva during the Obama administration. This lead to Jair Bolsonaro, an openly fascist authoritarian president, seizing power in Brazil, where he has been selling off the Amazon rainforest to corporate powers and attempting a genocide on the indigneous people who live in the Rainforest.

Adding on, Joe Biden championed the Patriot Act and the Iraq War after the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. The former legislation has led to the stripping of constitutional rights as a reactionary “counter-terrorist” measure, and the latter has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths made up of US Soldiers, Iraqi Soldiers and Iraqi citizens, not to mention hundreds of billions of tax dollars wasted on a lie orchestrated by the Bush administration and the media.

To sum this all up, I am glad we got rid of Trump, and there’s nothing wrong with celebrating that, but we must not forget that Trump was only the most severe crack in a broken and immoral system. The Democrats and Republicans in Washington won’t work to help you any time soon, so regular people need to start fighting for each other and not for the next corporate bought politician they support based on if they have a D or an R next to their name.