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US Vice President Kamala Harris, in Seattle, says the clock ‘is banging’ on climate change
(www.seattletimes.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
67 points (94.7% liked)
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They can’t pass any legislation, so the new strategy is to try to tout the supposed economic and environmental benefits of biden admins policies. Which is cool, except, it won’t work for a variety of reasons. You can’t go around saying, “Look how good the economy is” while half of everyone is fucking living on the edge of homelessness and suffering. You can’t claim to be doing good for the environment while approving more O&G leases on federal land than even fucking TRUMP, or while forcing pipelines through indigenous lands. You can’t claim to be supporting human rights while expanding the concentration camps at the border.
If they want to win, they need to do something that materially effects the majority of people. The majority of what they’ve done has done nothing noticeable for the majority of the country, and going around claiming it is the best thing since sliced bread is not only not true, but will degrade trust heavily and likely result in a Republican victory.
They passed legislation last year, using Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking vote in the Senate.
It's making a difference for a lot of people already, in the form of jobs and support for household decarbonization.
I know they passed that. That’s what I’m referring to, that isn’t having a material effect on the vast majority of Americans. Poor Americans (which is the majority) don’t have the money to afford electric cars or solar panels, they can’t even afford to eat 3 meals a day going by the most recent data.
What material benefits have the lower classes of the country received from the IRA? I’d be interested in seeing, because as someone who interacts with the working class on a daily basis, I have yet to even meet one blue collar worker who knows anything about the IRA before I tell them.
Good policy is known by all because it uplifts all. There was no one after the passage of the NLRA that said, “what is that?” Because the policy was crafted by and for the working class, addressing the issues they had directly.
Almost nobody outside the activist sphere has heard of the Inflation Reduction Act. It's not about poor vs rich or white-collar vs blue-collar. It's about there having been no real sustained effort to tell the public about it until the past couple weeks.
What material effects should I have had personally on my life by now, that I just haven’t been told about?
Depends on whether you're doing something like shopping for a used car (tax credit for buying used EVs) or looking for a job (a ton of new factories are going up)
Pretty similar to how the NLRA doesn't directly impact you most days, but changes the overall economic environment.
It did directly effect people when it was passed though, is my point. No one went to work the day after the NLRA was passed without having it directly effect both their work and their lives.
Most people aren’t shopping for a used car, especially not a used EV, they’re trying to survive in one of the worst periods of US economics in the last 40 years for the lower classes. EV credits are just middle class and up giveaways. The E-Bike program in my city has had more of a material effect on the lives of the lower classes than ALL of the EV credits put together.
My point is, people are material beings, and their perceptions are colored by their material reality. When someone is going around touting how good their policy is while the majority of the country is struggling just to make ends meet, and will never have a chance to benefit from things like EV credits, its not going to win any supporters that weren’t already on your side, and in fact risks alienating those on the fence.