By Yana Singhal
WASHINGTON, DC – In 2020, “the U.S. experienced some of the largest protests in its history focused on police violence and demands to restructure public safety” and knowing this “CNN moderators at (last) Thursday night’s presidential debate saw no need to directly ask candidates about these issues,” charged an Op-Ed by Alex Vitale in Truthout this week.
Truthout, an independent nonprofit organization devoted to commentating on various social justices crisis, noted, via Vitale, “while some of them (questions) did arise in the context of the opioid crisis, border enforcement and the overall well-being of Black America, the answers offered by both candidates lacked a clear political program.”
The article comments “Donald Trump’s overarching narrative for the debate was that Joe Biden has diminished U.S. power by opening the border and allowing millions of ‘illegal immigrants’ released ‘from prisons, jails and mental institutions’ to come into the country to ‘take our jobs,’ overwhelm our health care and Social Security systems, and rape and kill us.
“This narrative of declining American strength and safety absolves the multinational corporations and Wall Street of poisoning us, creating massive inequality and destroying the planet — the true sources of middle- and working-class insecurity. Trump’s solution is ever more resources for police, prisons and the deportation state.”
But the Op-Ed noted, in “response to this powerfully toxic narrative, Biden touted the fact that he has put more police on the streets and made a few weak claims that police and the Border Patrol support him — hardly a progressive or convincing counterweight to Trump’s xenophobic and authoritarian tirades.”
In particular, the Op-Ed found when inquiring about the fentanyl crisis, “Biden focused on interdiction issues, such as blocking precursor chemicals and machinery needed to process fentanyl from coming into Mexico,” whereas “Trump failed to even answer the question, using his time to hammer home his core messages about migrants as threats and Biden’s overall incompetence.
“Despite,” Truthout wrote, having the ability to respond to Trump’s indifference to U.S. citizens, Biden attempted “to respond to Trump’s tirades, allowing the former president to control the agenda and tone of the debate” which is seen again and again throughout various questions asked like racial discrepancies and police reformation.
Looking at the outcome of the debate, Truthout’s Op-Ed charges, “We need a completely different vision of the overdose crisis rooted in values of care and compassion as well as the science of drug treatment, harm reduction and safe supply that would save lives, restore families and communities and disempower violent international drug cartels.
’We must embrace the incredible value of immigration, legal or otherwise, which has played a huge role in revitalizing whole sectors of our economy and regions of our country. We must categorically reject the politics of xenophobia and articulate values of solidarity and directly address our own role in creating the conditions that have driven people from their homes in desperation.”
The Truthout Op-Ed concluded, “Trump’s debate responses reflected his allegiance with the most reactionary forces in our society — those that want to demonize migrants, unleash unregulated corporate power and ‘free the hands’ of police to use whatever forms of violence and humiliation are deemed necessary to restore some fanciful notion of order at the expense of the most vulnerable among us.
“Biden’s weak policies and incoherent responses during the debate may give us another four years of Trump and his drive to turn the U.S. into a despotic kleptocracy.”
