After Four Years, Accountability is Long Overdue

By ART CULLEN

Joe Biden became President Jan. 20, cause for optimism that things can only get better — albeit a low bar after what we have been through. When you have been locked up a year in a pandemic, and January Iowa blizzards throw snow sideways at 40 mph, good sense might advise otherwise. Yet, the sun will come out and we will plant corn, baseball will resume, and most of us should have a shot at the vaccine by June. I’m counting on it.

No matter what mayhem, democracy has risen to the challenge so far — at the polls, among courageous election officials from both parties, and in the courts. Traitors will be brought to justice. Trump was impeached a second time.

In its wisdom, democracy has rendered us a split verdict — a 50-50 tie in the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote, and a narrow margin favoring Democrats in the House. While it may promise yet more gridlock, a battle-fatigued American public may actually see compromise.

Biden will be able to seat his Cabinet. Republican Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has spoken favorably of Merrick Garland as attorney general, for example, whom he blocked from the Supreme Court in the waning days of the Obama Administration. The Grim Reaper’s scythe has been dulled.

Because two Democrats were elected to the Senate from Georgia, Biden has realistic hopes of passing major pandemic relief and a long-awaited massive infrastructure package early in his term. There is bipartisan support for both that could find 60 votes in the Senate; otherwise, much can be done with a simple majority vote through budget reconciliation.

There is little question that, given resources, the Biden Administration will improve on the short but dismal record of the Trump Administration on vaccine delivery. We will achieve herd immunity this summer, Dr. Anthony Fauci assures us. I am eager to take him at his word.

We must stand in awe at the speed with which a vaccine was developed. Sheer computing power is a real game-changer that can analyze genetic codes in seconds. Just think of the computing power in your pocket and multiply it beyond what you can imagine. That’s the digital muscle we can apply to controlling disease worldwide. It bodes well.

Those same people who figured out how to put the internet in your pocket also are warning us that we are up against a climate wall of floods, wildfires, disease and natural resource degradation.

Biden has put forward a $2 trillion climate plan that contemplates rebuilding our electric grid, refiring the industrial Midwest with battery and electric vehicle production, and creating entire new enterprises from hydrogen fuel cells to solar energy algae storage. Serious economic studies say it could be a boon from Appalachia to Texas, red states all that stand to benefit the most from a renewable energy economy with jobs that pay $75,000 per year instead of the $15 per hour common in rural employment.

Biden can find common cause with Senate Republicans to move America forward to a clean energy economy. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, fancies himself the father of the wind energy production tax credit. He will be a willing partner in wind and solar expansion. So will Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, where emasculated places like Youngstown can buzz again with battery production. Investment money is pouring in that direction, much of it currently to South Korea and China. That flow can be redirected here. McConnell can’t want to stand in the way of a new biomass energy industry that could transform coal country, whose future is otherwise only bleak.

Farmers are eager to conserve soil and reduce chemical use, not so much for new regulations. Agriculture is a major greenhouse gas contributor, but that can be reversed quickly. Conservation farming can be the fastest and cheapest way to draw down carbon from the atmosphere and into the soil, where it belongs, to improve land productivity while reducing nitrogen and methane emissions. Biden has considerable executive authority to use the existing farm bill to pay farmers for environmental services.

The administration also will find sympathy among Republicans for enforcing anti-trust laws against giant food and chemical companies that have been sucking Rural America dry, not to mention tech monopolies. The American Farm Bureau delegates just demanded open, negotiated livestock markets, perhaps cracking the door to breaking up Big Meat. Three-fourths of our beef comes from three companies.

Biden can patch together the reversal of a decades-long decline in Rural America that breeds so much resentment. He can prove that government can work for everybody, as he promises. He can harken our better angels on civil rights among people horrified by white supremacist violence. We can create a humane immigration system, finally. Georgia, which gave us Lester Maddox and Newt Gingrich, elected Black and Jewish Democratic senators. All things are possible.

Art Cullen is the publisher and editor of The Storm Lake Times. He won the the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 2017 and is the author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.” Cullen can be reached at times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2021

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