Phrase: hold someone's feet to the fire
- USput pressure on a person or organization in order to obtain a desired result."he vowed to hold the government's feet to the fire on this issue"
(Disclaimer: I've already voted for Biden. Don't dogpile me, fam.)
Biden would have us believe that he's listened to the concerns of progressives. And that the Overton window has been shifted a bit to the left to woo those voters after the DNC cheated him into the nomination. And I will say, some of it looks attractive. Him floating Republicans for his cabinet who voted lockstep with the fascists, or people who disenfranchised workers is very much not.
I don't envy the fellow. I wouldn't have envied Bernie either. They will inherit a country literally on fire. We've been divided against ourselves so very badly that Lincoln's proverbial house is on the verge of being unable to stand. And our government has literally been buckshot full of fascist abettors, supremacists and fundamentalists.
The country is this close to a civil war/fascist coup, and that's not even getting into the time between when the polls close and Biden takes office. North Carolina, where I feel I've been trapped again for the last 20 years, was a test run for the kind of scorched and salted earth campaign the GOP will launch as soon as things go south for the creature in the White House. When Gov. Cooper took office, the GOP did every last thing they could to keep him from actually TAKING office, or appointing his staff, or being able to do his job at all. It didn't help that they'd held onto their state assembly majority in 2016 until 2018. They were overturning Cooper's vetos whenever they could and doing their damnedest to make sure the election boards were rigged enough to stay in power and outlast him.
Now imagine that kind of resistance writ large across the entire country by an actual incompetent Nazi super-criminal being underwritten by hostile powers, and that's our upcoming Christmas season and winter. In the middle of an actual quarter of a million people dead plague situation.
And Biden's considering Republicans for his cabinet in the name of fellating bipartisanship? He was there for all 8 years of Mr. Obama's presidency one would assume. Even Barry realized after his first term that the GOP were in no way interested in bipartisanship and started ramming stuff through where he could without their permission or support. Moscow Mitch was even then spouting how the first and only concern of the GOP was to sabotage and bring down the Democratic presidency. And that was 4 to 8 extremely divisive years ago. At which point did Biden come to believe that reaching across the aisle again is going to result in anything but pulling back a bloody stump? Unless he's not been paying attention, you have to believe that kind of thinking is dangerously naive. One would hope the fellow's got someone telling him the fact of this, cos right now this avuncular shit's gonna get him creamed once he's in office.
So the linked article here from Huffpost very much gets into the fact that once he takes office, his ex-lawyerly, 90's crime bill authoring, for-profit prison enabling, black enslaving, feudalism introducing ass needs to have his feet very much held to the fire to see that he makes good on his promises and doesn't go all wishy-washy on the abettors of our current president. And he needs to realize as well that if he pulls a Gerald Ford on us by pardoning the outgoing president of his high crimes and crimes against humanity, he will lose immediately any electoral capital he will have gained in his ascending to the presidency. Examples of the fascists and supremacists MUST be made. And they must be made so very aggressively that we stand a chance of crushing the head of this poisonous Neo-nazi social meme for good this time. There will be a salted earth campaign on the part of the outgoing GOP. But there must immediately be a bloodbath in every level of government afterwards. A purge to root out the terrorist crime syndicate that has replaced our system of laws.
LIke I said... I don't envy the guy. He's got his work cut out for him. I hope it's the work he wanted to do in office. The next administration doesn't just get to sit back on its heels and push a return to some non-existent peaceful norm. There is no more peaceful norm. The illusion of it is all that has been ripped away. The exposure of the endemic problems in our system of government, laws, and how they are enforced for the 1% as opposed to the 99% is now self-evident. Active and aggressive steps must be immediately taken when Biden takes office. I've a few suggestions...
1. The immediate arrest and imprisonment of the Trump Family for high crimes, and crimes against humanity before they are able to flee to their foreign sponsors and paymasters.
2. The immediate creation of an FBI/CIA task force to investigate, interrogate, and bring to trial the members of the previous administration's cabinet and key members of the senate and house of representatives for treason and election interference, as well as the numerous other crimes that have been kept track of over the last 4 years.
3. An immediate executive order nullifying every executive order made by Donald J Trump since January 2016.
4. The declaration of a state of emergency, and the immediate creation of enforced lock-down conditions to contain and eliminate the Novel Corona-virus (c-19) through the creation of a vaccine, including the nationalization of pharmaceutical corporations to bring this about until the crisis is brought to a conclusion. Along with this must come a sustained relief package to help the American citizenry until such time as it can be safe to return to a more social standing. And this standing must be determined by the center for disease control, not pressure from the business community. There must be a federal ban on eviction and disconnection of basic services until such time as the infection and casualty curve has not only ceased to climb, but significantly dropped to levels prior to February of 2020.
5. The immediate closure and elimination of border concentration camps, as well as the arrest and trial of those complicit in committing crimes against humanity / genocidal crimes as defined by the United Nations at our southern borders. As well, there must be a formation of a task force to re-unite kidnapped children with their families separated at our border. And finally the immediate elimination and re-organization of our current border patrol, who for the moment are nothing but a reactionary extralegal gestapo force for the current administration. As well, the ICE must be eliminated.
6. The immediate deployment of the national guard and other emergency services to the state of California to address the ongoing ecological disaster threatening life, limb and property there.
7. The immediate declaration of the Ku Klux Klan, Proud Boys and White Supremacist groups as domestic terror groups. And that they be prosecuted under the auspices of the PATRIOT act until such time as that act can be allowed to expire.
8. A commission into the removal of Amy Coney Barrett from the Supreme Court of the United States as she was confirmed in violation of senate regulations by Mitch McConnell. If she is allowed to stand, then the immediate removal of Neil Gorsuch must occur, whose nomination was the result of irregular and hypocritical senatorial interference with the nomination of Merrick Garland. As well, a commission or task force must be formed to evaluate, dismiss and replace over 200 partisan judges appointed by the Trump Administration regarding their fitness or competence to continue on the benches they occupy. Barring this, assuming they can get the seats in congress, the number of judges on the supreme court must be expanded to a newer more representative odd number like 15. There must also be substantive and actual investigation of Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Roberts' alleged sexual assaults upon their victims, as well as the proper prosecution thereof.
9. The immediate replacement of incompetent governmental department heads who were obviously appointed to destroy the agencies over which they preside by the Trump Administration, and the proper appointment of competent administrators of those government departments.
10. The immediate cease of sales of military materiel to police forces around the country, and the repossession of said materiel from those police forces. This would be alongside a federal task force to root out and eliminate White Supremacist collaborators in our nation's police forces as domestic terrorists.
And that's just to START with in the first few months of any Biden presidency. The first order of the Biden administration is to immediately start trying to put out the out of control dumpster fire our government has been reduced to. It sounds draconian to me when I'm typing it, honestly. But we are at the level of needing to take drastic action to save our people, our country and the world around it. The emergencies are legion. And there is no time to waste on not addressing any of them. It needs to be swift, decisive, and not cut with avuncular namby-pamby overtures towards the illusion of bipartisanship when all that got us was a third of the country openly embracing a fascist nazi coup in the end.
The gloves must come off, and a top to bottom purge and re-organization needs to occur. And it needed to occur 12 years ago when Biden first became VP for Barry after the Bush II administration and their sycophantic deferment to the rise of the Tea Party. The lessons taught to us all since then by the successive disasters that followed should be all Biden needs to do what needs to be done. Any other reaction makes him a waste of space and effort.
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